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How Do I Prevent the Music App From Playing When I Connect To My Car’s Bluetooth?

If I open google maps while in the car with the bluetooth connection,the music app opens automatically and starts playing. I then have to fumble with the phone screen to stop the music.
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Bill

Comments: One Response to “How Do I Prevent the Music App From Playing When I Connect To My Car’s Bluetooth?”

    7 years ago

    This is a very common question. I experience this all the time in various cars: my car, my wife's car, rentals, etc.
    Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. You see it is the car that is doing this, not your iPhone. When you connect your iPhone to the car via Bluetooth or a USB cable, the car can request things of your iPhone. It seems a lot of cars want to request that audio start playing right away.
    So the only real possible fix is to look through the various menus and settings in your car's system to see if there is an autoplay function, which is probably called something different and obscure if it even exists in your car model. And it probably changes every year for that car model too.
    To make it worse, just about every car manufacturer seems to still insist on developing their own audio system with their own menus, functions and defaults. So if you discover a solution on a Toyota RAV4, it probably won't match up to a solution in a Ford Explorer.
    I've heard of other work-arounds: putting a long silent track as "aaaaa" in your music library so that plays instead. But it only helps if your car happens to always play the first track alphabetically. Some do, others pick up with whatever you were listening to last.
    Your solution of "I then have to fumble with the phone screen to stop the music." is actually what many people do. I've done it. One tip is to simply press and hold the home button so Siri interrupts the music and then you can tell Siri to "stop playing."
    Apple could build in a function that gives you a setting where music is automatically paused when you connect to a car. That would be a good thing for them to do, though I can only imagine how cars differ in the signals they send to the iPhone when you first connect. It could be that some cars insist on sending the "resume playing" command at some point even after the iPhone has connected.

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