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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> The recent change to the default media player for play-pause away from the last app and to Apple Music is one example.

What are you referring to? The play/pause button has never been an "Apple Music" button, and in fact the recent behavioral change is to make it even more aggressively go to the current app (e.g. if you start playing a video in YouTube, the play/pause button controls that video instead of iTunes).

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It doesn’t matter which app I last used - usually Spotify - when I get in my car the last song played in Apple Music plays. Annoying as hell.

iOS 12.1.2

Same here.

That’s usually an issue with the head unit or a weird interaction between the phone and the head unit. My old car used to auto play Music when it connected no matter what the source was on the head unit. My new one is better about not auto playing and respecting the last app.

Yes, that's my impression as well. As mentioned in a sibling post, the car where it's misbehaving seems to treat the phone more as a media storage backend than an audio source.

Also on iOS 12.1.2. I have never encountered this. I usually play audio in my car with either Pocket Casts or Spotify, and iOS reliably picks up on my last used app. I also have the Apple Music app deleted—maybe that plays into it?

Nope, not related. I have the music app and I use it. My head unit plays whatever I was listening to last. Usually my podcast app.

That’s only true if your last playing audio app isn’t killed in the background in the interim. If it’s gone the next time your HU asks for music, Apple Music gets used instead. So infuriating.

That's the case for one of my cars, not the other, but (without really knowing) I have a suspicion that it's actually the car doing this. There's a few cues on how its (now outdated) interface seems to want to act like its own full-fledged media playing device, with the phone as merely a backend storage, while my other car is more content to let the phone just act as more of an audio device with a few media controls (pause, skip...).

All of this is speculation.

I deleted the Music app and that stopped it. ️

Upgrading to a modern head unit also works but obviously costs more.

This is almost certainly due to the car trying to use the old iPod control protocol to tell your device to play. AFAIK that protocol just talks to the Music app, but it's also been obsolete for years.

Updated to 12.1.4 today, started listening to an audiobook in the Audible app, paused it, went to home screen & locked phone, got in my car, plugged in USB/lightning cable, started car, audiobook automatically began playing.

I have had it default to Apple Music when doing the same thing as above but with the YouTube app. I think it has something to do with YT not allowing background audio playback unless you sub to Premium. Which reminds me how much I miss Jasmine and ProTube.

I have only experienced this when swapping out to youtube or when the application I was playing music in previously gets closed to free up memory after a long period of time in the background idle (you can see this when the application appears to start up from scratch and doesn't resume from its previous position)

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