Background Mode

React Native Track Player supports playing audio while your app is in the background on all supported platforms.

Android

Background audio playback works right out of the box. By default, the audio will continue to play, not only when the app is suspended in the background, but also after the app is closed by the user. If that is not the desired behavior, you can disable it with the android.appKilledPlaybackBehavior property in updateOptions.

In this case, the audio will still play while the app is open in the background.:

TrackPlayer.updateOptions({
    android: {
        // This is the default behavior
        appKilledPlaybackBehavior: AppKilledPlaybackBehavior.ContinuePlayback
    },
    ...
});

Please look at the AppKilledPlaybackBehavior documentation for all the possible settings and how they behave.

Please note that while your app is in background, your UI might be unmounted by React Native. Event listeners added in the playback service will continue to receive events.

Notification

The notification will only be visible if the following are true:

• AppKilledPlaybackBehavior.ContinuePlayback or AppKilledPlaybackBehavior.PausePlayback are selected.
• Android has not killed the playback service due to no memory, crash, or other issue.

Your app will be opened when the notification is tapped. You can implement a custom initialization (e.g.: opening directly the player UI) by using the Linking API looking for the trackplayer://notification.click URI.

iOS

To allow background audio playback on iOS, you need to activate the 'Audio, Airplay and Picture in Picture' background mode in Xcode. Without activating it, the audio will only play when the app is in the foreground.

iOS Simulator

As of iOS Simulator version 11, Apple has removed support for Control Center and Now Playing Info from the simulator. You will not be able to test lock screen controls on recent versions of iOS Simulator. You can either test on real devices, or download older versions of the iOS Simulator.