Spotify Desktop App Patched With Data Bug Fix

Spotify was launched over ten years ago and is currently available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, Android and iOS. Its desktop application had a bug that was writing massive amount of junk data onto computers — up to 10GB/hour or 700 GB in a day if the program was in idle. The guys from Ars Technica discovered a number of users who were complaining about this bug and the Swedish developers reacted immediately and started working on the patch.

It seems that the problem was discovered in June when some Spotify users complained in various forums that the application was writing gigabytes of data onto their storage drives, shortening their lifespan and putting their health in danger. According to a user named “koutasn”, the application wrote 28.305.469.806 bytes of data in only two and a half hours and he noticed that the data was written only when playing music.

Then, he reinstalled the application and tested it again. This time, the application stored 1 GB in 17 minutes, or 320 MB in 4-5 minutes. Apparently, Spotify is trying to cache every song that it plays and if a song is played on auto replay, the application can eat up to 28 GB of data.

Spotify was informed about this problem and it was fixed in the meantime. “We’ve seen some questions in our community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop,” said the company, adding that “These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users.”

Users will have to wait patiently until the update will be available for all of them and they should receive it in the next few days. A month ago, Spotify users who own a computer were affected by malware that was spread through advertisements but luckily, attackers didn’t do too much damage.