Volvo Integrated App: Does Not Connect to Pandora

[Finchfry]

Same issue.  2019 Volvo S60.  Data plan works (Spotify works fine).  Pandora does not.  Logs in and shows playlist, but stays on "connecting" when trying to play a song.

Moderator Edit: Changing title for clarity

[bflores71]

Volvo's USA customer service number is 1 (800) 458-1552.  But that's not what I used.  Go to volvo.com.  Scroll to bottom.  On the right under Volvo Cars, click on Support.  This opens a new page.  Choose "Americas" then "United States".  Scroll to bottom and click on "Message Us".

[timpin42]

I'm having the same issue.  Pandora logs in and shows my stations, but always shows as "Connecting" when playing songs.  If I look at the "Now Playing" screen the app seems to be cycling through songs every few minutes without playing them (I never see a song title, but the time length of track keeps changing).  If I hit the pause button, I see the album art and the song Pandora thinks it is playing.  Hitting play puts Pandora back in the "Connecting" state.

[robross0606]

@timpin42 that's a really interesting set of details.  I will definitely allocate some time today to see if I can follow your steps to reproduce.  I'm really curious which version(s) of the Sensus system have this problem.  Is it just the older models that don't run on Android Auto or all of them?  That's could be a really important debugging detail.

If you (or anyone else on this thread) have time, I highly recommend each contacts Volvo customer service by phone to see if you can get "escalated to second tier help desk".  The 1st level staff are quite often reading from scripts and following prompts on a system -- they often have very little knowledge themselves.  2nd tier helpdesk is a bit better in that they can go "off script" but still may not have enough detailed knowledge of the systems to debug.  If you can get there, 3rd tier expertise is usually where the real action happens.

I will do the same as soon as I can set aside the time.

[robross0606]

FYI, I went back and looked through this thread.  Here is the list of car models mentioned in this thread so far:

• 2016 V60
• 2017 S60
• 2017 S90
• 2018 S90
• 2018 XC90
• 2019 S60
• 2019 XC40
• 2020 SC60
• 2020 XC40
• 2020 XC60
• 2020 XC90
• 2021 S60
• 2021 XC60
• 2021 XC90
• 2022 S60
• 2022 XC90

@AlyssaPandora or @TannerPandora, you have both been instrumental in the past on this thread with fixing this problem for people.  In the past, there seems to have been some success with "removing the link" between Pandora and someone's Volvo account.  Examples:

• #M3251
• #M3316

Can we try that again?  I will volunteer to have mine removed if someone on Pandora's end can do it.

[TannerPandora]

Hi @robross0606 

Thanks for tagging me and drawing my attention to this thread. I'm happy to remove your Volvo connection from your Pandora account. This may take some time to take affect, so I would maybe give it a half day just to be sure. Once this takes affect, you'll be automatically logged out, and you'll need to log back in.

In the meantime, I've gone ahead and created a ticket for these reports and notified our engineering team so that they can further review and investigate.

Let me know how it goes, and thanks again.

[robross0606]

@timpin42, I can confirm your exact behavior here on my own 2019 S60.  There are lots of really interesting things going on with the "Now Playing" page:

• The ⏯ button appears to be "stuck".  It reacts to tapping it, but never changes visual from ▶️.
• The total time code does indeed change as it tries to play different songs, but the current time code never goes past "00:00".
• If you tap ⏯ button, even though it doesn't change visual, it does appear to react to the tap.  When in what I think is "paused" mode, it suddenly shows the name of the song it is trying to play and even the album art!  The songs and albums matched expected music based on the station I was attempting to play.
• You can event use 👍, 👎 and ⏭ buttons to make it skip to the next "song" but it never actually plays anything.
• I looked up a couple of them and the shown time code matched the expected length of the song it was trying to play in every case.

So, to me, this clearly indicates the problem is somewhere in the streaming API.  The metadata is coming through, but actually streaming the song is not.  @TannerPandora, please pass along this information in the ticket as it is probably important for debugging purposes.

[TannerPandora]

Thanks for the follow up @robross0606 

I've included your latest notes and experience for the ticket.

I did have a question, mostly out of curiosity, that you may have the answer for. The Pandora app for Volvo requires a WiFi connection that needs to be activated, I believe by Volvo, I'm not sure if that has changed. If that's true, are there different tiers of WiFi connectivity available, or is there only one connection available?

Thanks!

[timpin42]

Awesome some! Glad it’s not just me.
Sent from my iPhone

[robross0606]

Technically, there are two ways you can use the Pandora app from the car:

• Connect the system to an external WiFi router.
• The car has built-in cellular (SIM card)

The reality is that the car isn't much different than a modern cell-phone "on wheels" in that regard.  However, it does appear that Volvo does some things with their cellular service (offered through AT&T) that make me think they're playing some architectural games.

The reason is that I tried swapping out the SIM card at one point in my car year ago.  When I put a fully activated T-Mobile SIM in the car (instead of the one activated through Volvo and AT&T) it received an IP address and was able to do a couple things across the Internet via cellular.  However, it was NOT able to access Pandora, Weather and some other services.  That experience is part of the reason I suspect there's some sort of proxy pattern being employed between the car and Pandora's cloud services.  It reminds me of the "carrier locking" that used to happen before the US government outlawed it years ago.  I suspect cars do not fall under the umbrella of those policies even though they should these days. 

In any case, the only "tiers" to my knowledge are how much data per month on your plan.  You simply activate the service through AT&T and choose your plan.  However, I also tried connecting the car through my home's Wi-Fi (which used to work) and that isn't working either.  Same problem.

[TannerPandora]

Thanks for that explanation and your personal testing, it's very helpful. @robross0606 

[bflores71]

Disconnecting and signing back in does not fix the problem. I even tried
deleting the app and reinstalling it. Still doesn't work.

[Dpcunningham2]

This is the same experience I am having. Thank you for documenting.

[robross0606]

@TannerPandora deleting the registered device on your end WORKED!!!  I was forced to log back in and it immediately started playing without issue.

I'd love to know what keeps happening to these registrations right once per year. 

[robross0606]

@bflores71 there's a big difference between you logging out and in, and Pandora deleting the registered device connection on their end. Not the same thing. 

[bflores71]

Deleting the registered device did not work for me though I’m happy To give
it another try.

Well, I’ve done both and neither worked.

Moderator Edit: Merged posts

[TannerPandora]

Hi @robross0606!

That's great news! I'm glad to hear it's working for you now. While I'm not sure why it gets hung up to begin with I'm glad this helped to resolve. I've made the note that this helped resolve for you.

@bflores71 

I'm happy to remove the connection from our end to see if it will help improve your experience. Just let me know if you'd like to proceed.

[bflores71]

My system all of a sudden works just fine today! We'll see if it sticks.

[robross0606]

😂

So maybe having my account reset was purely coincidental and everyone's Pandora is working again today.

... or maybe my account was the root cause of everyone else's problems. 🙃

[LH4120]

I'm having the same issues as all the rest in my 2018 S90. It has worked for the last 4 years with glitches every now and again with the system shutting down and rebooting but for the most part I was fine. Now it's completly stopped where it does the samething as everyone else where it says "connecting" and nothing plays. I can see the songs and so forth. I've deleted/reinstalled the app more than 10 times and resigned in but still nothing works. It appears that you are able to fix some of the previous customers. Can you look into mine. Thanks

[MariaPandora]

Hi @LH4120 , no problem!

Other users reported that after removing the connection from it helped improve their experience, so I have gone ahead and removed the connection between your Volvo and your Pandora account. When this takes affect, you'll automatically be logged out. It may not happen immediately so you may need to wait a bit before you are logged out.

Once logged out, try and log back into Pandora.

Let us know how it goes!