Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Device

(iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy 9, Macbook Pro late 2016)

Operating System

(iOS 10, Android Oreo, Windows 10,etc.)

My Question or Issue

I've been doing a lot of digging and can't find any information on this, so I figured I would start here.

I currently have an iPhone 12 Pro running the latest version of iOS 15. In my home, I use the Google Nest architecture of devices and have smart speakers throughout my home. I enjoy streaming music through these speakers for the obvious benefits over using Bluetooth. Now, here's the issue I'm running into.

If I start playing music from Spotify, whether by using the app to cast the music or by using the voice commands to the Nest devices, the command center on my phone shows the music that is actively playing. I understand this, as casting comes from my phone regardless of how I initiate playback. However, if I force-quit the Spotify app to remove it from my screen, it will magically re-appear sometime later (meaning that it shows back up in my command center and on my lock screen as active playback). This may be 20 minutes later, or several hours later. It's quite inconsistent.

The reason this is a problem: If this happens and I get a phone call, then answering the phone call stops the music streaming because my phone thinks that the music must stop to make way for the phone call. This is essentially the opposite effect that casting is meant to achieve, i.e. uninterrupted music streaming despite other phone activity. Similarly, if I'm in another app and I want to change the volume on my phone (to watch a video on Facebook, for example), then the volume will also change on the Nest streaming devices, even though these controls should be independent of each other.

I want to start here because this only seems to happen when casting from the Spotify app. I have disabled "Background App Refresh" on the Spotify app as well as the Google Home app, yet the issue persists.

Any ideas why my phone will just decide, on its own, to link back to Spotify playback? I should also note that when it does this, I check my background apps to ensure I haven't mistakenly opened back up Spotify, nor has the phone opened it up by itself in the background either. From all that I can tell, the app is still shut down when this happens.