Your comments
Thanks for helping us troubleshoot. We can now replicate the issue. The pause is the key. We'll check with our developer to see if this can be fixed. Based on related past issues, I know there are limitations on what can be done on the native lock screen player and how it interacts with our app, but we'll find out.
Thanks for the additional info. Very helpful. I forgot to ask which version of AC Central you are running. Please let us know that. You can find it under the Settings (gear icon) menu. I have an iPhone 15 running iOS 27.0.1 and the lock screen player is working correctly. Do you have any plans to update to iOS 27? It would be interesting to know if that fixes it, assuming you are also running the latest version of AC Central (v. 4.5).
We cannot replicate this on iPhones so additional info is needed. What model do you have and what version of iOS is it running?
Customer support service by UserEcho
The answer from our developer:
"This is a known limitation of how the app plays audio on iPhones. Audio runs through a built-in web player (shared with the website and Android), and iOS only keeps an app awake while audio is actually playing. About 10 seconds after pausing on the lock screen, iOS puts the app to sleep, so pressing play has nothing to talk to. Apps like Podcasts or Spotify avoid this because their players are built on Apple's native audio system, which iOS knows to wake up. Android isn't limited this way.
Our forked music-controls plugin doesn't get around this on its own. It handles the lock-screen display and buttons, but the audio still plays through the web player, which is the part iOS puts to sleep. For now, the workaround is pressing play within about 10 seconds of pausing, or resuming from inside the app."
This is possible to fix if we would invest in building an iOS-specific integration with Apple's native player. That is really expensive so we can't commit to that yet. Donations to AC Central are always appreciated!
Given that this is not technically a bug, we are closing this bug report, but feel free to add this as a feature request so other users can upvote it. Votes help us prioritize how to use our development budget.