Spotify on Garmin forerunner 265 sorting podcasts from oldest first

martinlanders77 said:

For some of my podcasts, when I try to update them on the watch, they are sorted from oldest episode first.
I have to scroll forever to get to the latest episode and it often times out / fails.

martinlanders77 said:

This makes it utterly impossible to get to the latest epispde.

martinlanders77 said:

causing more scrolling that is necessary

I think what's being buried here is the fact that when you're in Spotify and choosing media to sync, scrolling through these lists of media (podcast episodes and playlists) is *incredibly* slow (and as you said, can time out or fail.)

The lists are lazy loaded, so that every time you try to scroll to the next page (of 3 items), you have to wait for the next page to load. This would be ok if the next page loaded instantly (or had been preloaded in the background), but in fact, you have to wait several seconds for a page to load.

This means that, as you said, anything that's not near the top of the list is almost impossible to get to (unless you feel like scrolling for half an hour). There is a workaround for playlists, where you can set a custom order in the desktop app, but no workaround for podcast episodes (unless you put them in a playlist, which means that they won't be treated as podcast episodes by the music player.)

I don't understand why nobody seems to think this is a problem. No reviewer, blogger or influencer ever mentions that scrolling might be a tad slow when you're selecting media to sync. Another huge related problem is that you can only select one playlist or podcast episode to sync at a time. Before selecting the next item, you have to wait for the previous item to sync. So not only does syncing take a long time, the whole process has to be babysat (i.e. instead of selecting all your items, pressing sync and forgetting about it, you have select the first item, press sync, wait for it to sync, select the 2nd item, etc.)

As far as sorting goes, what if you want to select early episodes from a podcast you've never listened to? Then if Spotify sorts it the way you wanted (newest to oldest), that's not gonna help you. No matter which way they choose to sort it, one use case or the other will suffer.

Here's what I think should Spotify should fix when it comes to selecting media items to sync:

- scrolling through items should be much faster (if this means that album art is loaded in the background or not at all, I'm all for it)

- there should be a way to select multiple items to sync, instead of forcing the user to do one sync for each item

There's so many other problems aside from syncing, but fixing this stuff would be a great start.

BTW, the developer of the Spotify app is listed as Spotify in the Connect IQ store, not Garmin. Yeah I guess it's possible that a Garmin team actually worked on the app or provided some starter code, but officially the app belongs to Spotify.

So I'm not sure if leaving feedback with Garmin will help at all. (Not that leaving feedback with Spotify seems to help, either.) I've left feedback with both Garmin (using the ideas page) and Spotify (using the Contact Developer link in the CIQ store), but nothing has been fixed.