Car technology has come a long way over the last 5 years or so. I find it hard to believe that there are people who still don’t have Bluetooth in their car, but maybe because I view it as “basic” technology now. This technology though, makes your life really easy. I mean, you step into your car and your iPhone automatically connects to your infotainment system. When you’re driving, it’s super easy to make or receive calls, without having to physically pick up your phone. Which, in some places is against the law. But it’s also incredibly dangerous.
What’s both a blessing as well as a curse, is the idea that your iPhone will automatically start playing back the audio that you were last listening to. So, if you were listening to a podcast, your iPhone will automatically start playing that when it connects to your car’s infotainment system. Or it might start playing songs from your music library. I say that this could be a curse for a couple of reasons. I tend to listen to things that others might find a bit much or offensive, so blasting that out to my passengers can be embarrassing. Especially when those passengers are my parents.
The problem itself is pretty simple, but Apple doesn’t provide an option to prevent audio from auto-playing when your iPhone connects. That said, there isn’t one clear solution, but we are going to give you some ways to attempt to manage this.
Disable Settings
The first thing to do is disable AutoPlay settings in the Vehicles Infotainment system. If Apple’s not going to help us to be able to disable this, we will try to go around it. You’ll have to go into the settings of your car’s infotainment system in order to see if there’s an option to disable the music from autoplaying. This might take some research, and even a little bit of digging. If this doesn’t solve the problem, you will have to move onto our next two possible solutions.
Kill the Audio App
If you have the podcast or audiobook app open in the background on your iPhone, then, of course, it’s going to automatically start to play. I mean, that only makes sense. While Apple doesn’t suggest that you should force kill apps on your iPhone, this might be the time to do such a thing. This will definitely help, but it might not necessarily solve the problem.
Silent Music
Ok, so this might not exactly be the solution, but it will help prevent those embarrassing scenarios from happening. If you don’t use Apple Music, and you actually carry your own music library around on your iPhone, then you can add a track yourself. Title it “A a a a Very Good Song”, and then add it to your library. This will automatically take alphabetical precedence over any other song in the library. Since it’s a silent music track, there will be no music blasting out of your speakers at your passengers, unnecessarily.
Perhaps iOS 12 will have a better solution to this. And if not, there’s always time for iOS 13 to include this kind of feature.