How I Stopped Apple Music From Auto-playing In My Car
This was originally posted on dinobansigan.com, which years ago was my dev blog.
I love listening to music in my car using the Spotify (or occasionally Pandora ) app on my iPhone 6S. Unfortunately, most of the time, my iPhone will start playing music from the Apple Music app as soon as it establishes a Bluetooth connection with my car. Sometimes it will auto-play music using the Spotify app if I was using it prior, but most of the time it defaults to Apple Music. So I would have to manually open Spotify to switch to the music I want to listen to.
For some reason I've simply put up with this for years now... Well not anymore. I eventually got tired of having to manually open the Spotify app, so last week I spent time trying to come up with a solution.
One of the good suggestions I saw online was to turn off music streaming via your phone's data (LTE). This made sense to me. No music streaming access, would mean no auto-playing of music. I also barely had any music stored locally on my phone, so it should work.
In practice though, it didn't work. What was happening was that my iPhone would still open the Apple Music app after it connects to my car via Bluetooth. What's worse, is that sometimes it will sit there not playing any music, or sometimes it will start playing music via the WiFi connection at home (like when I start up the car in the morning). Either way, I would still have to manually open the Spotify app. I needed a better solution.
Thankfully the fix for me was very simple; I deleted the Apple Music app. I initially thought this was not doable as Apple Music seems to be an integral app for an iPhone, but it turns out you can. And since I didn't really need the Apple Music app, this fixed my problem completely. Now when I turn on my car and the phone establishes a Bluetooth connection with it, it will start auto-playing music from the Spotify app, which is exactly what I wanted it to do!
Now obviously this solution will not work for people who use the Apple Music app, though that begs the question, if your phone is already auto-playing music from the Apple Music app, and Apple Music is your preferred music app, what is the problem? If you are someone who prefers to keep the Apple Music app on your phone, I'm sorry but I don't really have a solution for you. You can try disabling music streaming via your phone's data and see if that helps.