• Hildegarde
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    1311 months ago

    I’m pretty sure its because mobile OSs are designed to only let one app access the audio at one time.

    • JohnWorks
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      911 months ago

      Samsung has a workaround for this with their sound assistant app. It’ll let you both control individual app audio and allow apps to play audio at the same time.

    • @Lojcs@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Android isn’t and fairly confident ios isn’t neither. Apps are made to behave this way because it’s generally more convenient. They can ignore it or not trigger it for other apps just fine, like in the case of WhatsApp conversation tones or shutter tones

      • @scrion@lemmy.world
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        211 months ago

        How do you mention you can play multiple audio streams at the same time and then claim the OS is designed to let only one app access an audio channel / device? Which one is it now? Let’s dig a bit deeper into this:

        Also, let’s not blame everything on the OS vendor being malicious. In most cases, playing multiple audio streams simultaneously would be annoying. In android, you can absolutely play multiple sources simultaneously, and Android will mix everything together and play it.

        That being said, starting with API level 31, Android actually started to enforce a concept called audio focus at the system level. That would be around Android version 12. Audio focus is basically a token that can be requested and handed from app to app, and only the app holding the token gets to talk, everything else is faded out.

        I’ll agree that enforcing this and not making it configurable for the end user was a pretty dumb move, but that was simply a UX decision, not certainly malicious.

        If your phone is rooted, you can work around it, e. g. via an xposed module.

        • @Zorque@lemmy.world
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          211 months ago

          How do you mention you can play multiple audio streams at the same time and then claim the OS is designed to let only one app access an audio channel / device? Which one is it now?

          Just because it’s designed that way doesn’t mean it works that way all the time.

          Basically they’re saying it’s designed so that it’s easy for an app to override your current audio stream, but allows for it to run concurrently if they want.

          As most app developers wouldn’t want that, they hijack the audio by default.