Audio playback interruption on Android devices

[yelkamel]

Which API doesn't behave as documented, and how does it misbehave? The just_audio package for Flutter is not behaving as expected on Android devices. Specifically, the audio playback is unexpectedly stopping for some users, even though the progress bar continues to move. This behavior is not documented and appears to be a bug.

Minimal reproduction project Unfortunately, we cannot provide a minimal reproduction project at this time as the issue is not consistently reproducible in development or release environments. It only occurs for some users in production.

To Reproduce (i.e. user steps, not code) Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Start playing an audio file (meditation or sleep music) using the just_audio package
2. Let the audio play for an indeterminate amount of time
3. Audio playback stops unexpectedly, but the progress bar continues to move
4. Attempting to restart playback results in the progress bar moving without audio

Error messages We don't have any error in crashanalytics.

Expected behavior The audio should play continuously without interruption for the entire duration of the audio file.

Screenshots No screenshots are available at this time as the issue occurs randomly for users.

Desktop (please complete the following information): N/A - This issue is specific to Android devices.

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: Various Android devices
• OS: Various Android versions

Flutter SDK version

• Flutter version: (sdk: '>=3.0.0 <4.0.0')
• just_audio: ^0.9.35
• audio_service: ^0.18.15

Additional context

• This issue only affects some Android users and is not reproducible in our development or release environments.
• The problem started occurring recently, but the app was working fine before.
• We've verified it's not a memory leak issue.
• Affected users seem to have sufficient RAM available (based on crash analytics data).
• No crashes are reported in our crash analytics related to this issue.
• The problem occurs for both short and long audio files.
• The issue persists whether the screen is locked or unlocked.
• It happens both when the app is in the foreground and background.
• Some users report that restarting the audio from the beginning after the interruption allows it to play normally.

We're seeking assistance in identifying potential causes or additional debugging steps we can take to resolve this issue.

[Chaphasilor]

We are seeing similar reports for Finamp. Related issue: https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp/issues/956
Users report playback stopping a few seconds or minutes after leaving the app or locking the screen (which could be exactly the buffer duration).