Android 15 playback control and interruptions

  • Unknown's avatar
    aweibell · Member ·

    I love Pocket Casts, and it’s many nice features! However, after my Fairphone 5 got an Android 15 upgrade, there are some annoying issues. Not sure how close they are related.

    1. Playback control from my Garmin Forefunner watch is often not able to trigger PLAY. Not when stopped manually, and not when stopped by sleep timer. It shows episode title, position etc. but when I press the PLAY button, it either just flash to pause icon and back, or the icon does not change, or I get a message in CAPS saying that I need to start the music from my phone. Now, when testing, I actually saw that my phone changed from browser to PC app! But it did not start playing, and the title disappeared.
      Even if I am not able to trigger play from the watch, I can press the button of my earbud (Jabra Elite 75t) and Pocket Casts starts playing! The Play icon on my watch becomes Pause, time position updates every second and everything seems normal.
      I can stop playback by pressing pause button on my watch, and if I immediately press play again, it starts playing, but if I wait just two seconds, it will not start again.
    2. Sometimes, but not always, playback stops when a notification arrives. And actually right now, as I was just playing a podcast while typing here, it stopped with no notification incoming. And the watch suddenly displayed the “start from phone” text, and is not showing the title anymore!
    3. There also appears to be some very short interruptions in the playback sometimes (far less than a second).

    Here are my notification settings (in Norwegian)

  • staff-eleanor · Staff ·

    Hi there, @aweibell! Thank you for sharing more details about the playback issue you’re seeing since you’ve switched to Android 15. Some initial troubleshooting steps you can try include:
    – Upgrade the phone, watch, and Pocket Casts app to the latest version. And, update the firmware, if available, for the devices. Then, restart the devices.
    – Make sure that Pocket Casts app has unrestricted battery access. The settings vary depending on the device, but in general you can go to device Settings > Apps > Pocket Casts > Battery to view the options.

    Also, let us know which version of Pocket Casts app you’re using. And, if you have the same issue when connecting to a different device, such as Bluetooth headphones or speakers. Or is the issue only with the watch controls?

    Thank you in advance for any other details you can provide.

Reply to Android 15 playback control and interruptions