Radio goes silent with wireless CarPlay when using certain apps on my phone

This is one of the most annoying things. Note that this does not happen if your phone is the audio 'source' - ie: streaming something from your phone. When this happens, I use the buttons on the steering wheel to go to the Music panel, and switch the source back to FM or SiriusXM. Then usually the radio stays on, but with some apps it will continue to cut out.

It is most annoying when I'm killing time sitting in my car and not driving, and trying to play a game or use apps on my phone. Or when my wife is driving and it is my CarPlay connected.

To me it seems like a bug - yes the car audio should cut out when you are doing something on your phone that is actively outputting audio, but it seems to happen whenever an app or page 'might' output audio. Like in a game where the music and sounds are turned off. There is no audio from the game, yet Carplay silences the radio.

Would love to know if this exists in CarPlay in all cars, or something with Toyota's implementation.

 

I believe this is a limitation with how the audio on smartphones generally works. I don't have an Apple device to compare, but on Android the system is essentially single app focused and so whatever is running in the foreground will have audio priority and it's not really possible to do multitasking/mixed audio. Furthermore, turning the sound off in a game or app may not actually preclude that app from opening the audio device; it may only prevent the app from playing sounds through the audio output. So the phone's operating system likely doesn't know that the app isn't playing sounds. It just knows that the app is using the audio device, even if that "use" is nothing.