Has anybody else experienced that your audio is reported as coming through totally chopped up and garbled whenever your iPhone sleeps its display? This is using FaceTime Audio over cellular. I don’t think APP play a role, but I always have them on when on these calls and the issues pops up. In order for the other party to report that my audio is OK again, I need to actually unsleep my iPhone.
This has been going on for a long time and across at least 2 different iPhones and 2-3 iOS major versions. It’s independent of the other caller. I’m curious if anybody else has experienced this with FaceTime Audio. I wonder if it’s related to a setting I have for power management or background tasks.
So is nobody else experiencing this, is nobody else using FaceTime Audio for calls, or does nobody else allow their iPhone to sleep while on such a call?
FYI - why you might use FaceTime audio:
FaceTime makes an Internet connection, rather than a cellular connection. This may make a difference, e.g., when you are out of country and your cellular phone plan could be expensive.
This would be the case if your hotel offers free internet connectivity, for example.
We use FaceTime Audio sometimes with our son on my iPhone, often with the display off, but assuming you mean APP to mean AirPods Pro, they aren’t part of the equation. We just use speaker mode. I’ve never experienced garbled audio in any sort of reproducible way.
I had a suspicion this could be related to AirPods or BT.
When I otherwise use BT connections or wear the APP, the display is usually turned on and I’m watching something or interacting with the phone.
The FaceTime Audio situation is unique in the sense that while it’s going on the iPhone sleeps its screen (and whatever else power savings that might invoke).
This is a tricky one since it involves so many aspects. iPhone, FaceTime Audio, APP, sleep, and network. I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered the issue over wifi, only LTE and/or 5G. Also, it’s totally asymmetric. When my audio is reported as garbled, I still hear the other person just fine.
I suppose for now the workaround will be to set display sleep to never when on a FTA call. I hope that doesn’t lead to pant dials or similar though. And that I remember to turn auto sleep back on when the call is over. I’m going to need lots of luck with that one.
Does Shortcuts have an action to set display sleep (and then start FaceTime)?
If so, you can set up a Shortcut to do that and another Shortcut to undo it at the end of a call.
If there is no such action, you can set up a Shortcut to start FaceTime and also remind you to set display sleep using “Show Alert” to describe the Setting to change. (I have done that where there is no action for what I want to do.)
I wonder if problem is related to a known problem of the cellular network I discovered while writing a feature for IEEE Spectrum about a decade ago. If the cellular network gets overleaded, it reduces the data rate for the overloaded part of the network, which can make calls unintelligible. It was a common and very frustrating problem at the time which I experienced frequently at the time (when I was calling on landlines over Verizon FiOS). Once a call passed through one low-speed circuit, its quality reduced and would not recover.
It is less common now but it still exists. Several months ago my daughter called my cell from her cell and I couldn’t understand her, although she could hear me. Frustrated, I called her cell from my landline and could understand her clearly. What that told me was that somewhere on the 10 miles of network between us was a network traffic jam with during the first call, that was avoided when I called from my landline.
The result is like the classic problem of an old copper telephone line somewhere in the network; you called back again and hoped to avoid the clogged line. I live less than half a mile from the junction of Rtes I-95/128 and I-90, so I suspect the cellular jam comes in traffic is jammed in the interchange. I don’t know what your problem is, but it might be something in the neighborhood cellular connection. I have not noticed a problem with FaceTime, but we only use to talk with our niece and her infant daughter who are using on a cell phone while I am on a desktop mac. So my theory is that it would be somewhat localized or limited to certain people and configurations. Hope that helps.
