I’ve been experiencing an odd annoyance. I’m not sure how long it’s actually been a problem; I finally became fully aware of it after I started using Siri timers to remind me to take one of my pills.
If I have my iPhone outputting sound to an external Bluetooth speaker, notifications do not sound. At all. This does not happen with my Bluetooth hearing aids or with Bluetooth headphones, only speakers. It happens regardless of whether there is actually any sound being output at the time, and it does not seem to be dependent on which app is the source of the notification.
Is there a setting somewhere I’ve missed that can fix this? I don’t allow a lot of apps to use audio in notifications, but those that I do are somewhat important notifications. Like taking my pill on time, or low sugar alerts from my CGM. So I’d really like to not have my notifications silenced just because I’m streaming audio to a separate speaker.
Too bad Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource is macOS only. I wonder if it would be possible for them to develop an iOS version? Surely they’ve considered it. Curious what happens if you use iPhone Mirroring while your phone is connected to your speakers? Do you hear anything? Just brainstorming…
I can’t try iPhone mirroring any time soon. It requires both Sequoia and iOS 18.
While I’ll be upgrading my devices to iOS 18 sometime in the coming week, my MBP is on Big Sur, and I’m not going to jump it to Sequoia in one huge leap. I’m getting ready to upgrade the MBP to Monterey in the next month, and probably to Ventura by the end of the year (I like to take time between major upgrades), but Sonoma and Sequoia aren’t on the schedule yet.
I once had a Bluetooth adapter that went into some kind of sleep state when inactive, then would lose the first half-second or so of audio while it was waking up. Not a problem with music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. that played constantly, but if I wasn’t playing any audio and a notification came in, the notification sound was completely lost due to the activation delay. If you’re having the same issue, then notifications that happened when you were actually listening to an audio stream would be played, but if you didn’t have any audio going then short notification sounds would be lost.
Good to know, but as you thought, it probably doesn’t explain my issue. The notifications are silenced when sound is playing from the speaker and when it isn’t. Also, a half-second delay wouldn’t completely silence most of my notifications, as the notification sounds I’m missing are all longer than a second. Most are at least three seconds long. So I should be hearing something.
You’re not alone, I have noticed this too over the past few months. On one hand I like not having the notifications play loudly over the speaker. On the other I don’t like missing them entirely – I’d like the notifications to still play from my phone speaker. This is something you can do on the Mac. I’d love to know if there’s a way to control it on my phone.