Amazing! Thanks for that.
Oh to be clear: I’m not using my phone with “Don’t keep activities” (or even developer settings) enabled every day. I was just using it to demonstrate the problem. “Don’t keep activities” allows simulating what happens when an Android Activity is destroyed by the system to reclaim memory (docs here).
I’ve not personally experienced there being different behaviour of “Don’t keep acivities” across different devices. I did want to double-check a few devices to see what was happening with the newest Arc however (1.67.360). I tried the following steps on my Pixel 6a, a Pixel 4a and an Android 16 emulator (to get a comparison with “stock” Android):
- Install Arc
- Install Spotify
- Enable developer settings
- Enable “Don’t keep activities”
- Open Arc
- Start playback
- Navigate to another app
In all three, the audio continues playing but the Arc notification disappears. If you navigate back to the app, it shows the track in a paused state and resuming stops and then restarts playback (from the same position). It’s important to point out that while the notification is gone, controlling playback via Bluetooth headphones or a watch is not possible. So, this is definitely an improvement, but it’s still pretty janky as you lose the ability to control playback outside the app, and I believe it still points to there being something wrong with how Arc deals with playback in the background. As a comparison, running through the same steps with Spotify in all three devices behaves as you want: audio keeps playing with the notification and the app remaining up to date with the playback state. I’d be interested to hear if you get different results running through these steps on some devices.
In my day to day (without developer settings shenanigans), I’ve noticed a similar (and I’m assuming related) problem where the Arc notification will disappear (and I lose the ability to control playback from my earbuds) and to get it back I have to force stop and then reopen Arc. This is especially frustrating if this happens while playback is paused by the transparency mode on my earbuds as playback will then not resume without unlocking my phone and I need to force close and reopen to allow control again.