Fix Pandora song skipping on iPhone

For whatever reason since updating to iOS 4.0 Pandora has been misbehaving on both my iPhone and iPod touch. If you haven’t run into this basically what happens is a few songs will play normally before they start to skip and stutter, for some songs it almost sounds like it’s part of the song, but the more you listen the more the song skips. Finally the app will either crash or the song will stop playing completely, very annoying.

So how do you stop the songs being played in Pandora from skipping randomly? Get ready for it:

Delete the app and reinstall the newest version.

This might seem like common sense, but not everyone thinks to do this since the app may have worked just fine (it did) on a prior iOS version. Before just deleting and re-downloading the app, I updated to the newly available iOS 4.1 download which made no difference.

I’m not really sure what the problem is or why the songs start to skip in the first place, but it has happened to both my iPhone and iPod touch, and a friend of mine says it happens to his iPad too which makes this extra interesting because it’s running iOS 3 (remember the iPad gets iOS 4.2 in November) so perhaps it’s not unique to iOS… It’s never happened on the desktop or web clients (which I rarely use nowadays due to the Pandora song limit), but it does occur on the completely different Android platform too which suggests it might be related to their mobile development efforts. Growing pains? Just a software bug? Who knows, I don’t think it’s a bandwidth issue because it happens whether I am connected to WiFi or 3G, but I am glad I found a simple fix.