Speaker switching while playing voice messages broken

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#14,229 33 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
android, kotlin
Domain
audio-video-rtc, mobile

Research direction

Start by reproducing the speaker-routing failure during voice-message playback on a Pixel 9 Pro XL running Android 15 or 16, following the hand-over-phone steps in the report. No source file, test, or entry point is identified; done means playback switches back to the external speaker after the obstruction is removed, without requiring the app or phone to be restarted.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Guidelines
  • I have searched searched open and closed issues for duplicates
  • I am submitting a bug report for existing functionality that does not work as intended
  • This isn't a feature request or a discussion topic
Bug description

Hi,

since a few versions (IIRC) the speaker switching while playing voice messages is broken.
So what I mean by that is, when I e.g. hold my hand above the phone or my cheek, it switches to the internal ones while otherwise it's using the "external" speaker.
I can reproduce it by start playbock while the phone lays on my table and then holding my hand above the phone, so that it switches to the internal ones and move the hand back again. It keeps using the internal ones. Even hitting pause / play again doesn't change that. Even entirely closing/aborting playback and starting from the beginning doesn't help.
I have to close the app as well as lock/unlock my phone.
Not sure if that's an Android / Pixel bug but it was working fine some time ago.

Pixel 9 Pro XL, Android 16 (15 was also affected IIRC)
Can anyone else reproduce that by chance?

Screenshots

No response

Device

Pixel 9 Pro XL

Android version

15 and 16

Signal version

7.45.3

Link to debug log

No response

Dominant language
Kotlin
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