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as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.
by Angostura 9y ago
as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.
- judah 9y agoAuthor here. I'm with you for random websites. But what about apps that are media players, ala Pandora? My app is a music playlist/radio station hybrid. It's expected to play music; it's the whole point of the app. iOS Safari doesn't let me play audio until user interaction. OK, that's fair. But it also blocks me from playing the next song when the current one ends. That's not cool. It breaks my app. It forced me to bundle my PWA as an app in the store, just to get around this restriction. FYI, I reported this problem to Apple's iOS Safari team. They acknowledged the issue and said they can probably fix it in the future. (That was 2 years ago.)
- jakobegger 9y agoI think you misunderstood something. Websites can play audio in the background on iOS. It works great for podcasts — but only as long as you don’t want to control playback. The API is there, Apple didn’t omit it on purpose. But it is broken.