I love Tidal but I need to say goodbye to this buggy mess of an app
Please don’t take this as just a rambling post, I genuinely hope it reaches someone at Tidal as useful feedback.
After being a Tidal customer for around 8 years, I’ve decided to switch platforms. I like what they stand for, but the bugs have become unbearable. Here are the ones I’ve run into:
- Second song tracking bug (Desktop / Windows & macOS): When playing music and it switches from the first to the second song in an album or playlist, the app will show that it’s playing the second song in the queue while actually playing the audio from the first. This has been going on for years, it’s baffling that it hasn’t been fixed, and honestly says a lot about how much they prioritize UX.
- Background downloads don’t work (iPhone): The app has to be in the foreground for songs to download. If it goes into the background, downloads stop silently. You’ll leave home thinking your music is ready, only to find it’s still sitting in the queue.
- Corrupt downloaded tracks (iPhone): Downloaded songs often fail silently, when you reach a bugged track in the queue, playback just stops and it asks you to go online. I wish there were some kind of integrity check or self-repair system for broken files.
- No way to clear cache (iPhone): The cached storage grows unreasonably large with no built-in way to clear it. My workaround was uninstalling and reinstalling the app entirely, which shouldn’t be necessary.
- Wired EarPods lose in-line control after pausing: Not sure if this is Tidal-specific, but after pausing with Apple wired EarPods, the in-line buttons stop responding after a couple of minutes and you have to reconnect them to resume playback.
- Unexplained mobile data usage abroad: On a recent trip, I got off a flight having listened to music offline, activated my travel SIM, then continued listening to a downloaded album. By the third song, I noticed my cellular data had spiked by 400MB from Tidal out of nowhere, with mobile data downloads disabled and no online streaming in the queue. I have no idea what that data was used for.
- No artist catalogue guardrails: This one isn’t a technical bug, but it’s worth mentioning, there are no apparent safeguards against imposters uploading music under a well-known artist’s name. If someone creates an account matching an existing artist, their tracks can end up appearing on that artist’s page. I’ve seen this happen first hand with artists like Lorde and Arca. It’s a moderation and metadata problem that undermines trust in the platform, especially for a service that positions itself as artist-friendly.
These are just the ones off the top of my head. If Tidal ever addressed them, I’d genuinely consider coming back, but given their track record, I’m not holding my breath. Has anyone else run into these, or is it just my setup lol