As of today, Room ARC only works in the foreground. Switch apps, silence, switch back music.
How do I resolve this please? Presumably this helpful new feature sailed right though QA?
Spectacularly this behaviour is happening for downloaded albums too.
When do you think I’ll be able to use the service I pay for? Or shall we just call it a donation for the time being?
You are going to need to share more info about your use case, android or apple etc.
If you search the forum you’ll find people have had similar issues.
Android 15 / Google pixel 9 / Room ARC 1.0.60 build 100323. Obviously a massive edge case of OS and device, there’s no way QA could have tested such a unique and rare combination.
Why do you think my device and OS details are relevant? Roon ARC is no longer correctly aligning with the Android foreground service. Sloppy code, sloppy testing, sloppy support.
Unless its an android issue?
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Why so angry in your first post?
I think you would find that people are much more willing to offer help and assistance if you just chill out a bit.
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Pixel 9 XL
Android 16
ARC 1.67 (360)
Could it POSSIBLY be that you are not running most current OS or app version? Or possibly a conflict with your other music players. My ARC works flawlessly foreground / background / Android Auto.
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How about updating your device to the current version of Android and RoonARC?
I’m running a Pixel 7 on Android 16 with RoonARC 1.67 (360)–the latest version–, and it is working as expected.
I’m not having this problem my Google Pixel 9 Pro. However, I am on Android 16. It seems you are on Android 15. Try upgrading to the latest Android.
There are definitely issues with notifications on Android that can cause Arc to only run in the foreground - force killing and restarting usually fixes it.
I’m here to stick up for the poster. I have been having issues with ARC on my Pixel 9 + Android 16 for months. Notification closures are just one of them. Occasionally there are overheating issues caused by ARC. It’s a mess.
I’ve previously posted a support thread about this here and did some investigation. It might be worth posting your problems over there as they seem related.
Part of the issue is Android and the individual manufacturers implementation of power management and audio switching from app to app.
On my Android phone I can have music playing in any app and I occasionally I can open chrome or another app and music stops.
I’m finding Arc does it less though these days. Fluke maybe.
My daily driver is an iPhone 16 Pro Plus and this occasionally does the same.
The new open app takes control of the audio stack. Some apps do so less often.
These issues have been ongoing since Android 14. See this older thread.
This is definitely awkward. But Arc has problems working in the background in situations that other music apps (like Spotify) are fine with (see my linked thread), so I think there’s still a lot the team could do to improve things.
Having had a few discussions with the Roon Arc Dev team and for my use case situation it comes down to an Android phones manufacturer on how power manage Is handled. They don’t have an unlimited pool of devices to test Arc on. This was one reason I chose to go back to using an iPhone. A smaller pool of devices and they do test with these.
My Nothing Phone 2 has stock Android but with their own tweaks here and there. The same can be said about all manufacturers.
Pixel devices are not immune from this.
However, I agree more could and should be done to prevent this.
I don’t though, not now, get Arc stopping music when the app is put to the background on my Android device. An Arc update maybe fixed this for me.
The awkward bit is that it didn’t do it all the time in either of the example scenarios 
If all phones lacked power management and background app handling then we would complain about battery consumption.
You’re right that different manufacturers have different approaches to power management (https://dontkillmyapp.com/ documents this well), but it’s possible to reliably demonstrate Arc having problems with standard and documented Android app lifecycles using testing tools available in developer settings on real devices or an emulator. Getting technical (I work on Android apps day to day) in the other thread:
Roon Arc is not able to handle other situations like configuration changes where the Activity would be recreated by the system.
How often this happens will vary by device and setups on those devices (configuration changes can be caused by a lot of things for example). Other comparable music apps (Plexamp, Spotify etc) are able to handle these situations, and I am not aware of a reason that Arc shouldn’t be able to either. I can’t be sure without seeing the code itself, but my suspicion would be that this is the root of the problems with background playback and notifications that people are seeing.
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I don’t think they are listening. My Roon arc does not respond at all. Maybe one of these days they will fix this issue. We should not have to deal with this. I am set to cancel at end of subscription. They have no fix, no service group. They hope user groups like Reddit will fix it.
You haven’t opened a single Support request, instead preferring to complain all over the place how they don‘t help you. I’d suggest a more constructive approach
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