Engagement is eating the world, maybe engagement is now driving these decisions, too. People who listen more, buy more, so optimize for time spent listening.
My car and phone achieve a level of randomness that makes me wonder at the complexity of the software behind it. Usually it starts playing Music, but sometimes it's another app, especially if the last thing playing on my phone was YouTube. But sometimes it's YouTube even if the last app that played audio was something else. Sometimes I get the pause music from a game that's been running in the background for days.
I can't even predict whether Music will start in shuffle mode and pick a random song or if it will start playing an album I was recently listening to in sequential mode.
The result is that I've started to look at my phone the way I used to look at cable TV, as an invader in my home that works for people who want to manipulate me.
So there's actually three different components involved with this. Someone else has already mentioned the possibility of cars that just lie to your phone and say you pressed the play button because "well the user connected their phone they must want music".
The OS itself is also responsible for managing where that "play" command goes, and because this is a mobile device it also manages what apps are in memory, which one owns media playback, etc. If nothing is currently playing, it has to pick something, because you pressed the play button and you're currently driving down an overextended highway at unconscionably American speeds and can't be arsed to care about what app's play button needs to be pressed.
Individual apps can also grab or drop the media playback role at any time. Maybe that game has some background sync nonsense to send you a bunch of notifications, and whenever it gets woken up to do that the game engine it was written on immediately tries to start media playback because nobody tested it for background use.
Music's inconsistent behavior sounds like someone didn't implement state resumption correctly.
The underlying problem is that nobody owns the whole experience and this all is supposed to happen without projecting selection UI to the user. The phone just hears "PLAY MUSIC DAMN YOU" and makes a shitty guess as to what you meant.
This is one reason I'll only run customized android builds without gapps until something better comes along. Linux phone devices are becoming more and more appealing
My car and phone achieve a level of randomness that makes me wonder at the complexity of the software behind it. Usually it starts playing Music, but sometimes it's another app, especially if the last thing playing on my phone was YouTube. But sometimes it's YouTube even if the last app that played audio was something else. Sometimes I get the pause music from a game that's been running in the background for days.
I can't even predict whether Music will start in shuffle mode and pick a random song or if it will start playing an album I was recently listening to in sequential mode.
The result is that I've started to look at my phone the way I used to look at cable TV, as an invader in my home that works for people who want to manipulate me.