Android 17 background audio hardening

Nothing crashes by default. Playback and volume change calls fail silently, and audio focus requests return AUDIOFOCUS_REQUEST_FAILED. To find them, look in adb dumpsys audio or logcat for entries prefixed AudioHardening with your package name: level: full means you run a foreground service without while-in-use capability, level: partial means no foreground service at all.

Google’s recommended path is the media3 Jetpack MediaSessionService, which manages the playback lifecycle so you are unlikely to be affected. Without media3, start a mediaPlayback foreground service while the app is still in the foreground, for example at the moment a video app’s user taps “keep playing with screen off”, so it gets while-in-use capability. Keep it running through short interruptions under 10 minutes, such as buffering or AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT, and stop it, with the media session, when playback really ends; restart only when the user resumes.

On Android 17 devices from Beta 3, Google provides an adb command with three modes: enable applies all restrictions to all apps, including the while-in-use rule regardless of target SDK; disable turns them off; throw enables them with loud failures, throwing IllegalStateException for volume and focus calls, so bugs surface in testing. See the Background audio hardening page on Android Developers for the exact command.

The full list is in Android 17 behavior changes. Plan these together: app memory limits, the local network permission and Google Play target API level.

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