Ever since the Walkman days, music lovers have taken their music anywhere and everywhere they could. We take our music out for a run, we bring music into the shower, and we always bring music when we travel, be it by plane, train, or automobile. And since we bring our music where our internet sometimes cannot follow, that means that offline modes for our music apps are important. Offline for Spotify is an abomination, and call me crazy, but I believe it's intentional.

Let's begin with what you have to do to turn on Offline mode. Turning on Offline mode is a three-tap process at a minimum. From the home tab of Spotify: Tap Your Library. Tap Settings (the gear icon in the top right corner). Tap Offline mode to toggle it on. And to turn it back off, you have to come back to the settings, as opposed to apps like Google Play Music, where Downloaded Only mode can be activated directly from the hamburger menu and can be disabled simply tapping the Downloaded Only banner at the top of the most screen in the app. You can't trigger Offline mode for Spotify in Android Auto, so if you want to only listen to downloaded music in the car, you have to turn it on before you plug up in the car. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines With Offline mode enabled, three of the five tabs of the Spotify app won't work. Radio doesn't work without internet, because radio stations can't be saved for offline playback. Browse doesn't work without internet because you can't choose to download what you haven't seen yet. The home tab doesn't work without internet because ... I actually don't get this one. At the very least, the Home tab could show your recently played and some recommendations from your downloaded music in the Home tab, but no, the tab is just disabled.

This leaves you with the Search tab, where you can listen to recent searches that you've downloaded, and My Library. Even in My Library, though, things aren't made any easier in Offline mode, because you still see your whole library. If you go to Albums trying to see what albums you can listen to offline, be prepared to hunt for those little green downloaded icons underneath the album names, because albums with zero offline songs are still down in your Albums list. Same with Playlists; a playlist with zero songs downloaded for offline still shows in your Playlists list. The Songs list isn't much better, because rather than hiding all non-downloaded songs, your Songs list is the same as the online version, except most of the songs in it are greyed out. If you're trying to find something to listen to quickly in Offline mode, it better be something in Recently Played, or else you'll be digging through the filter settings in each section of your library for Downloads, a filter that won't automatically turn on and off with Offline mode the way most apps handle offline mode. This is compounded by the fact that even though Spotify caches while it streams, that cache can't be played offline the way other music apps do: you have to explicitly tap Download for every album and playlist you want to listen to offline.