iOs stops playing as soon as app goes into background

[ryanheise]

iOs stops playing as soon as app goes into background

[ryanheise]

Hi @volgin

As mentioned in the README, "This plugin can be used with audio_service to play audio in the background". If you missed that, please take a look at that other plugin. But if you already read that but disagree with the vision I had for this project, I would be happy to explain the vision below.

I created just_audio because I needed a plugin that "just" plays audio and doesn't do anything else, including background features. The problem that arises when a plugin does more than one thing is that it starts to step on the toes of what other plugins do, and makes it complicated to mix and match plugins together. The vision is to build an ecosystem of cross-platform audio plugins where you can mix and match the plugins you need, and where there would be, for instance, another separate API for creating a background audio session, that only some apps will choose to depend on.

Background playback is not a requirement of all audio apps, and it involves a whole different set of native APIs, including on iOS, the option to update information in the now playing info, and to respond to controls in the control center, and then on Android, the option to display the current media item in the notification/lock screen, and to respond to controls in those places. I have already run into problems where I could not use two audio plugins together because they were both trying to do certain things in an overlapping responsibility between the two plugins, and thus I decided to institute a separation of concerns and create one plugin for just playing audio (just_audio) and a separate plugin for setting up a background audio session (audio_service). Since it is really the vision for this project, that is unlikely to change.

While it is also tempting to think this is a feature that could be easily added to just_audio (putting aside the fact that it would betray the name of the plugin), this is only the case on iOS, and definitely not the case on Android where background execution is really quite involved, and I do want to create a plugin with consistent behaviour across Android and iOS. And of course, most developers who want to play audio in the background will realise they want more and more features as listed in the previous paragraph, and this will inevitably lead to feature creep, and make the plugin less reusable in different contexts.

[volgin]

Good points. I will try audio_service today.

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