Playback pauses in IOS when Sonos playing first

[jabaine]

Plan

Premium

Country

Canada

Device:

(iPhone SE, Sonos Play:1, Lutron Caseta, Ford bluetooth)

Operating System:

(iOS 15.2, Windows 10)

My Issue:

I took a 3 hour drive recently (mid/end December) with my phone connected via bluetooth to my vehicle. every time i hit play, spotify would play for a few minutes then pause. I restart playback by hitting play again or reconnecting to vehicles bluetooth it would play a few minutes then pause, everytime.

Background info:

Back in October everything worked fine and no issues. I had alarms setup in sonos to play different spotify playlist every hour back in October and the sonos was playing before initiating playback from iphone. when playback worked. I installed a new device since then (lutron caseta) and setup a schedule to play on the sonos different playlists and turned off the internal sonos alarms. The lutron schedules were enabled when I noticed my issue and sonos was always on prior to starting playback from iphone.

test one: I disabled all schedules in the lutron caseta app and alarms in sonos with sonos not playing anything from spotify. everything worked as expected . connected to vehicle blue tooth

test two: I re-enabled the internal alarms in the sonos app to play different playlists every hour and with sonos playing the issue came back. connected to vehicle blue tooth and not connected(playback on iphone only)

test three: disabled sonos alarms or schedules and played spotify on iphone but having spotify playing from within sonos first. the issue continued to happen.

test four: turned of Sonos playback and played spotify on iphone. playback normal

Conclusion:

it looks like there is a priority or a hand off issue between Sonos and IOS. My preference would be that if I initiate playback from a device it would pause any other device currently playing. (or add a prompt maybe)

[Eni]

Hey there @jabaine, 

Thanks for reaching out about this here in the Community. 

Take into account that we can't guarantee the proper functionality of the app when using third party services such as Lutron caseta. 

From what we understand is that the playback in device A doesn't stop when starting the playback in device B (Sonos, iOS), so it's not working as expected. 

In this case, we suggest that you try performing a clean reinstall of the app on your phone to check if that makes the difference. 

On another note, we'd like to know if the same happens when using different devices. 

We'll be on the lookout for your reply.

[jabaine]

"From what we understand is that the playback in device A doesn't stop when starting the playback in device B (Sonos, iOS), so it's not working as expected." is correct if device A is Sonos and device B is IOS(iphone or ipad). If I swap the devices around and device A is IOS and device B is Sonos it works as expected.

this continued to occur after clean installs of the app on IOS.

the only other device i could try was on windows PC and found that as long as device A is Sonos and device B was windows PC it did not work as expected also.

side note: also observed when device A(Sonos) transitions from one song to the next, this is when device B playback pauses/stops.

[Eni]

Hey @jabaine, 

Thanks for the clarification. 

Just to make sure, when this happens, do you start the playback from the app on Sonos?

If so, we suggest that you try reinstalling it to check if that makes the difference. 

Additionally, we'd recommend checking if the firmware of your Sonos is up to date. 

Lastly, sending us a video about the issue happening would come in handy. 

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

[jabaine]

please see attached videos

img 1850-1.mp4  shows playback initiated from an alarm set within the sonos app and img 1851-1.mp4 show playback initiated manually from the sonos app.

reinstalled the sonos app prior to this test and verified that the sonos firmware was up-to-date.

[MafeG · Accepted solution]

Hi @jabaine,

Thank you for keeping in touch.

After sharing and discussing your case internally, it looks as if there's some sort of de-sync happening between the Spotify server and the Sonos integration when an alarms feature is used.

Since a third-party integration is involved, at this point it's not clear on which end this needs to be amended. Because of this, we cannot promise that we'll be able to provide a fix for this. It might be a good idea to reach out to Sonos customer support about that as well.

We thank you for the feedback you've shared with us and will definitely take it into account as we keep working on improving integration with other apps. 

If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for you.