With Spotify app, some issues seem to be due to Spotify themselves. For example, even when you explicitly download music to your watch, the app needs network connection to start playing. This seems to be explicit design decision on Spotify's part.

The (unfortunate!) hack here is to disable the BT connection on your phone, works 90% of the time.

Also when downloading songs, its better to disable BT on the phone, otherwise the songs download through BT instead of through the much faster Wifi connection. This is clearly an Apple impendiment here, crippling a feature that should work without these sort of hacks.

Likely a condition from IP holders to make sure the play is counted and paid for.

Pennywise pound foolish and harming UX at the same time. They could just require that Spotify logs the plays and uploads them on the next connection. Resulting in more plays and more money. But instead they block it for the 0.1% of the time that the watch is lost, destroyed or reinstalled before that sync happens.

And people wonder why piracy happens.

> Pennywise pound foolish and harming UX at the same time. They could just require that Spotify logs the plays and uploads them on the next connection. Resulting in more plays and more money. But instead they block it for the 0.1% of the time that the watch is lost, destroyed or reinstalled before that sync happens.

Why are you just blindly accepting their vapid evidenceless postulation lol

Garmin watches can start Spotify playback offline just fine. You need to have synced your playlist within last 30 days, IIRC, and that's it.

Authentic user activity is Apple’s greatest asset to its partners.

Spotify has offline mode in their iPhone app

I dunno, I use the spotify apple watch app just fine

Do you listen without your phone? Ime the app is fine with phone nearby, but for independent playback from just the watch it’s trash.