Thank you for your patience while we worked through this issue. The team has released improvements to USB output in ARC that should stabilize this type of setup.
It’s important to note that ARC doesn’t support true Thunderbolt devices directly. Instead, it relies on the USB audio interface exposed by the operating system. In setups involving Thunderbolt, ARC is effectively interacting with a USB audio device provided by the OS. When we investigated logs back in 2025, your ARC instance was showing some interruptions in the framework around the time it should have been pairing. That’s what we resolved; it’s expected now that the device should either work or not work, but not connect only intermittently.
Please let us know if you’re still encountering issues here and we’ll pass them along to the team for further investigation. Thank you!
I shared in my last post that I had switched from an iPhone 13 with a Lightning connector to an iPhone 17 Pro, and at that time was still seeing the same audio playback issue over the iPhone 17 Pro’s USB C.
Since then, I have been defaulting to the less desirable Bluetooth connection. Sounds like it’s time to test via USB connection!
If I understand you correctly, it should either work now or not at all. Will give it a go in the coming days and report back here.
I was able to do some testing while running errands today. It seems to work fine once I get the USB C connection playing. It takes some steps though…
When first connecting via USB the progress bar moves in ARC and music appears to be playing there, but there is no sound over the car’s speakers or progress bar movement on our car’s head unit. To get sound, I have to toggle to the Bluetooth connection in ARC, start playback from there - then flip to the USB dock connection in ARC to get playback going over the car’s speakers. Once this is done it continues to play fine.
I disconnected / reconnected the USB C cable from my Phone a number of times and the result was the same for each occasion. Connect USB → flip to Bluetooth in ARC & start playback → flip to USB dock connection in ARC and select Play.
Not perfect, but it worked every time when following the aforementioned steps.
Thanks! That’d be marvellous! The toggling back and forth is less than ideal. Especially when, upon connecting the USB, ARC defaults to that output. Appreciate you guys!
We don’t have any new updates, but we wanted to write in and mention our development team has everything they need for now for additional work around this issue.
We’ll go ahead and temporarily close this thread for now, until we have any new information or updates to share.
Thanks for sticking with us on this one, and we’ll be in touch as soon as there is more information to share.
