My daughter’s a huge fan of Spotify, which is great but when she’s out of the house, she forgets that it uses cellular data. Rather than argue over overage costs, how can we turn off cellular functionality so it only works on wifi networks?
Great news for your daughter: You can enjoy all your favorite Spotify music even when you’re completely offline by downloading your favorite tracks while you’re still on wifi. That’s what my kids do because I got tired of them eating up all our cellular data on our AT&T Wireless plan because they’d listen to the same dozen songs again and again, forgetting that we were paying for that connectivity! If you have an unlimited data plan or upgrade with your cellular carrier, of course, you can safely ignore all of this (though be careful if you travel overseas and are on a roaming plan. That could be quite painfully expensive!)
The trick is that you’re going to need to have her phone in hand when you make a couple of different changes to the settings and configuration. I’ll show the process for an Apple iPhone, but it’s quite similar for an Android device since the app is basically the same across both platforms.
I recommend starting out by changing the iOS settings to block cellular data usage, then going into the Spotify app itself to change a few things therein too. Possibly redundant, but that’s okay! Start by going to “Settings” and swiping down to find Spotify:
You can see I have a lot of apps that start with “S” on the list, but it’s near the bottom. Tap on it to get to the specific settings for this app in the iOS system:
Theoretically, if you tap on the slider adjacent to “Cellular Data” you have completely turned off Spotify’s ability to access cellular for any reason. But let’s be sure by going into the app itself and disabling cellular at that level too.
Launch Spotify for iPhone on your daughter’s mobile. It’ll look like this:
(well, she probably listens to different music and has different playlists than I do, but hey, if she or you want to follow my playlists, here are a few easy links: The Beatles & More and Movie Soundtracks 🙂 )
Tap on the “Your Library” link on the lower right corner and your daughter’s music will show up:
At this point, you want to tap on the gear icon on the top right of the app screen.
Now the Spotify settings and preferences menu appears:
One more tap. That’s it. Tap on “Streaming Quality” then swipe down to find this:
You can see the option here: “Download Using Cellular“. Disable that too to ensure that when your daughter does download songs it doesn’t somehow end up using cellular. And that’s it, you should now be able to rely on your daughter never using cellular data for her Spotify in the future (unless she disables one or more of these settings, of course!)
Great tip Dave! My first thought on this question – since I’d just dealt with a similar issue of wanting certain apps to not use data – was that I’d go to Settings, then tap Cellular. There’s a list of apps there that can use data, and in this case, you’d just find Spotify and toggle its switch to “off”.
When i do this, I find that the toggle switch is off in the other place in Settings (the place you mention) as well.
Is one easier? Well, yours involved “Scroll, tap, tap” and mine is “Tap, scroll, tap”… so I guess they’re both OK. But just wanted to mention that there is indeed more than one way to skin an iOS preference! 8^)