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I agree but I wish they would have added a permissions dialog instead of outright blocking. If a site injects an autoplay audio tag iOS could prompt you once if

I agree but I wish they would have added a permissions dialog instead of outright blocking. If a site injects an autoplay audio tag iOS could prompt you once if that behaviour is OK or not for that particular domain. Apples creative interpretation of standards is pretty annoying to me as both a user and a developer, sometimes auto playing audio is actually wanted, in games for instance.

SG- 11y ago
I dunno, I think the last thing anyone wants are more dialogs on websites, especially mobile.
- ninkendo 11y ago
  Rant: Moreover I think the whole "let the user decide" attitude is just a lame excuse developers hide behind when they can't figure out a decent UX. (It's no wonder design-by-committee software like we see on desktop Linux has so many UI options... Nobody can come up with anything people can agree on so "make it a checkbox so the user can decide" becomes the solution.) Unsolicited sound is a horrible idea on any platform, it's a good thing that iOS only allows it when there's a touch event somewhere in the call stack. Dialogs would only worsen the problem; disallowing it altogether is the only sane solution.
  - jtuchsen 11y ago
    A Belated Rubuttal Rant: Developers do lean on users too much to solve UX problems, but I still maintain that giving users a choice here would have been the better alternative. Access to device sensors are almost always behind some kind of permissions dialog on major platforms. Personally I like web/iOS model best, it prompts me when an app/site wants to use my microphone, gps, camera, etc, and then remembers the choice I've made. Making potentially invasive or offensive application behaviour completely transparent to the user is a good user experience in my book, and it discourages developers from using those sensors unless they actually need them. Although I can concede that getting permission for unsolicited access to the phones speaker might be going to far from the small sample size here, and I am just as annoyed at the recent auto playing video trend on the web as anyone else. Unsolicited sound is pretty important for games, and increasingly the web is becoming a pretty good platform for them. I wrote a little game a while back and I worked around the sound issue in Safari by initializing my sounds (just a few) on the users first tap, not a back breaking workaround or anything, but still annoying that I had to work around Safari. Here's the thing though, if I hadn't been testing on iOS a critical (the sound actually was) part of my game would have been broken on iOS. I guess I'm just grumpy about that... :-/

SG- 11y ago

I dunno, I think the last thing anyone wants are more dialogs on websites, especially mobile.

ninkendo 11y ago
Rant: Moreover I think the whole "let the user decide" attitude is just a lame excuse developers hide behind when they can't figure out a decent UX. (It's no wonder design-by-committee software like we see on desktop Linux has so many UI options... Nobody can come up with anything people can agree on so "make it a checkbox so the user can decide" becomes the solution.) Unsolicited sound is a horrible idea on any platform, it's a good thing that iOS only allows it when there's a touch event somewhere in the call stack. Dialogs would only worsen the problem; disallowing it altogether is the only sane solution.
- jtuchsen 11y ago
  A Belated Rubuttal Rant: Developers do lean on users too much to solve UX problems, but I still maintain that giving users a choice here would have been the better alternative. Access to device sensors are almost always behind some kind of permissions dialog on major platforms. Personally I like web/iOS model best, it prompts me when an app/site wants to use my microphone, gps, camera, etc, and then remembers the choice I've made. Making potentially invasive or offensive application behaviour completely transparent to the user is a good user experience in my book, and it discourages developers from using those sensors unless they actually need them. Although I can concede that getting permission for unsolicited access to the phones speaker might be going to far from the small sample size here, and I am just as annoyed at the recent auto playing video trend on the web as anyone else. Unsolicited sound is pretty important for games, and increasingly the web is becoming a pretty good platform for them. I wrote a little game a while back and I worked around the sound issue in Safari by initializing my sounds (just a few) on the users first tap, not a back breaking workaround or anything, but still annoying that I had to work around Safari. Here's the thing though, if I hadn't been testing on iOS a critical (the sound actually was) part of my game would have been broken on iOS. I guess I'm just grumpy about that... :-/