iOS: Airplay won't stay connected

[timmytambo]

I’m hitting this continuously as well and despite being a Pandora customer for years it is enough of a deal breaker for me to cancel my family subscription. Attempting to play pandora over airplay only works for about a minute before the app or background task appears to crash stopping the music playback. All other music services over airplay work fine as does chromecast via Pandora. Only pandora and AirPlay cause the issue 

Moderator Edit: Changing title for clarity

[TannerPandora]

Hi @timmytambo 

Welcome to community!

Sorry to hear you're having trouble with AirPlay when playing Pandora. Could you tell me a little more about your experience.

• Does this appear to only happen when Pandora is in the background?
• What is your iOS version?
• What is your Pandora version?

In the meantime, I've enabled a trace on your account to help me review. For the trace to be useful, please uninstall and reinstall the Pandora on your phone, and continue to play Pandora as you normal would. The next time you attempt AirPlay and it crashes, let me know the approximate date and time. I'll have a closer look to see if there is anything unusual. 

Please note, uninstalling and reinstalling the app will remove any offline content. You'll need to re-download the content you would like for offline listening. 

Thanks for your help!

[timmytambo]

Pandora Version: 2506.1.1
iOS Version: 18.5

The issue seems to occur consistently when in a particular state. It appears to be related to the background task since it only occurs when the device locks or I put the app into the background. At that point it will occur in the next 1-2 minutes with 100% consistency.

I rebooted my device at which point the airplay worked more consistently but I inevitably get back into the broken state in the future as this has been going on for well over 6 months now.

I have reinstalled Pandora and will let you know a timestamp when the issue occurs again.

Thanks a lot for the response,
Tim

[TannerPandora]

Thanks for the follow up, @timmytambo! I appreciate the details, very helpful. Just curious, are you connecting to a smart speaker or an Apple product like HomePod? I'd like to try and reproduce your experience on my end. Thanks! 

[timmytambo]

I am most often casting to RPi running snapcast with an AirPlay endpoint. However, once in this state it seems to repro for any AirPlay endpoint like my Sonos Beam gen2. The fact that rebooting my phone changed the behavior makes me feel like something that Pandora is doing in the background isn’t playing nicely with some system component.

I’ll keep you posted on any other things that come up on my end in the meantime.

[timmytambo]

I now seem to be back in this state after some time of things working correctly. Just hit the issue at 3:00 PM PDT with the account above.

Thanks,

Tim 

[timmytambo]

Hitting again. 2:04PM PDT.

When this happens I can literally watch the background task die on my watch. I can repro continuously now. 

Moderator's edit: Merged comments.

[timmytambo]

I am going to move from an annual subscription to monthly with plans to cancel in the near future if I can’t find a way to use this consistently with my airplay devices