android app doesn't work properly

Hi,

I have a Fairphone 3+ with Android 10 on it and a Premium Deezer subscription. The app started working up, fast forwarding songs and repeatedly logging out of my account. I have tried all these steps, but now the app doesn’t want to open at all. I have tried this three times. All other apps seem to be working fine.

Would really like some advice as to how to solve this.

Wishing you a great day!

Kiona

Hey Kiona, @kiona001 

Thanks a lot for reporting it to us, we haven't had some Fairphone's reports in the community in general.

Could you please confirm the Deezer's app version so that I can forward this to our devs? In the meantime, check on your phone settings if there's something like power-saving features blocking our app 

Hi Rudi,

Thank you for your reply! I believe it is Deezer 6.2.12.102 ? No specific version is mentioned in the app info, I got this from the storage settings.

I have checked my battery settings, no abnormal settings are used.
 

Best,

Kiona

Hey @kiona001

Thanks for coming back and speaking to our colleagues in the Customer Care teams.

I've referred your example to our devs for further investigation. In the meantime, they've suggested you check your app settings for storage - perhaps you can try increasing your smart cache in the app and check your phone storage as well, to see if you have enough space 

Hi Rudi,

Thanks for the tip! I’ve had to replace the storage card and it seems to be working again. Any idea on why certain songs tend to fast forward? That is still occurring. Thanks a lot for your help already!

It could be a problem with the tracks themselves @kiona001 

Would you be kind to post the links for them here so that I can test it? Thank you, you make Deezer a better service 

This is a copy paste of the rating I wrote on google play. I was told to check this website, browsing on the Deezer community made me even more upset to see that some problems are there since years.

Let me put it clear, I use Deezer for two reasons:

1. I dislike Spotify commercial choices
2. Deezer audio quality is superior

I have been a paying customer since two or three years, I can’t even remember now as I do not use it so much.

I used Deezer’s Android app on various devices, now for reasons I won’t explain I am stuck on a Nexus 5 running LineageOS 7.1.2

Here’s what I wrote:

 Why am I paying for this. 90% of the time the apps keeps showing me the load bar and does not answer to any command. 50% of the times it suddenly stops while playing a playlist. 20% of the time i need to clean the cache because it hogs my mobile. The UI is terrible to the point that I repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Finding interesting information bout a track/queue is impossible. Pay somebody who knows about HCI or if you're really poor ask me, I will suggest something that works.

Reading around this forum I’ve seen suggestions of deleting/reinstalling the app, cleaning the smart cache, lots of other things which I regularly do but I am sorry guys these are design flaws.

After removing the cache the app shows me the loading icon on the "music” tab. I do not know what is doing. I assume it’s reloading your weird modern web-based interface from somewhere. Clicking on the search button and performing a search yields more or less to the same result for some minutes (MINUTES). My network is fast. My phone is old but still ok, at least it can download webpages faster than the Deezer app even with firefox for mobile that I wouldn’t say it’s the fastest choice out there.

After waiting these minutes I can use the app. But it’s not over.

• The search function is (known to be?) bad, one has to search exact strings and exact artists to find stuff, just a part of the name of a song is useless. It can't even find tracks that I have in my playlists sometimes, which is quite frustrating.
• Finding the settings has always been a nightmare in all versions. I know the drill now, music->cog etc. Except when the loading wheel is appearing there is no cog. Seriously, write an app and not (what it feels like to me) a lame website app wrapper. After so many years! But I guess it’s modern coding fashion.
• Anyway the playing a playlist thing. Every now and then it just decides not to play the next song in playlist, or sometimes it plays it and no sound comes out. The fix is to press pause and play again. The most dreadful thing is that the progress bar of the song keeps going. It is actually playing but the stream is not sent to the device. I do not know where the bug is, it happens mostly when a bluetooth speaker or headset is connected, but it has been there for quite a bunch of versions to my memory. Maybe an android lib issue?
  In any case I would love to have bird’s view of the playlist, and I always end up starting a new song, because swiping right-left while a song is playing does that, and inadvertently clicking on a song while in playlist view (aftern one finds the symbol in the lower right, of course) also frequently ends up in skipping tracks. Maybe I have too big fingers and nevrotic clicking, maybe it’s just me, but it’s not the way I would have designed it…
• Cleaning the cache. It’s a cache, I can of course clean it as a user, but it’s the software that uses caches not humans. Why the thing cannot do housekeeping itself when the cache is trashed. I do not have offline mode enabled. I do limit the cache to 1.3GB ,which to my memory I never managed to fill, so I have no idea what is so bad with this smart cache. Maybe it’s so smart that it wants to do stuff itself.

I was quite scared when Deezer was peeking at my youtube and suggesting to listen music on deezer, so luckily now I have the security stuff to prevent the app spying on me or you disabled the feature. I am still a fan of yours but I wonder, why should I keep paying if after 3 years the app even got worse (from my personal point of view)?

Regards,
Florido

Hey, Florido @bjaast 

Really nice and well written feedback, much appreciated.

Here at Deezer, we're very much in line with what you've said, that's why we're focusing hard this year in making the app much more reliable and robust, so that you don't have to experience that.

Please stay tuned to the community for updates, you'll see it for yourself 

And about the YT experience, it's just ads related to the content you have, no spying involved 

Will forward your comments on, thank you!

Hi all!

4 years anniversary of paid premium and stuff is basically the same. New phone (Fairphone 3) with stock android 11 and SAME PROBLEMS. 

To the record, some stuff improved. Unfortunately I believe almost nothing is due to better coding. Let's go thought it.

• The hangin on loading bar doesn't happen on such a modern phone. It's no surprise. Let's say I solved this myself.
• The cache problem and the sudden stop playing playlist happens now 20% of the time. I believe is related to caching. On such phone I have plenty of cache space. I solved this for Deezer as well.
• All the issues with seeking and caching seem to be resolved. I suspext is more due to core power than code, byt clearly there has been improvements in UI responsiveness.

Ok now for the good things

• Search still sucks, but definitely less. Ok nobody is google. It's a nice improvement.

Now the still dreadful things

• Sometimes the album cover shown is not the music playing. This is not an album or track thing, this is spaghetti code in the asynchronous fashion that today pollutes every piece of code
• Overall UI still sucks. I still make the same mistakes that disrupt my experience. Browsing favorites, playlists and albums is a pain as you always risk of skipping to the next track.
• Album info is as sad as any other possible streaming service that exists since the cloud. We were hoping for more information instead we get very limited things (album year and length but no per track info that I am sure labels keep somewhere. Maybe they sell this for a price as well)
• Hands off experience is quite poor. I would really love any of these apps to tell me what the next song is. But ok that's a pro feature.
• Seeking on tracks on Android is also sad. I use Deezer to rehearse music for my band. Most of the time it makes me curse. It is hard to precisely seek and there are some responsive delays that are quite annoying.

Ultimately I do not listen much to mainstream music so I am slowly using bandcamp more than Deezer. Unfortunately that has been recently acquired by Epic and I expect it to go to s**t soon. Their android app also has several shortcomings similar to Deezer's but I must say is much more responsive and pleasant to use. Especially playlist management does more or less what one wants. But I wouldn't say it's the best example to follow. Except their radio management, which is actually a playlist and it's beautiful to be able to go back and forth on the tracks of the radio issue.

With Deezer most of the time I have no idea what queue is playing as it is hard to distinguish between queue, playlist and album list. Everything looks the same.

I don't think Deezer will ever use my money to go in the direction I want. I am just waiting for a better service to come. As long as I play music I need quality tracks for rehearsals, so Deezer will still get my share.

Maybe when I stop doing that I'll resort to YouTube instead.

Cheers,

Florido

2 months later, after a search, clicking on a track keeps not working. One has to restart the app to “fix it". It happens again after some search. It doesn't matter the search or the track.

Ridiculous.

I don't know what framework you use for this thing, but it just has design flaws.

Also, I don't really know what your functional tests are, but they also are clearly not discovering any issue.