Apple Music randomly plays when I remove AirPods

Apple, this is not cool. I moved to your ecosystem from android and I am generally happy BUT in the middle of the night when I switch AirPods Pro (version 2) off and take it out my ear, my phone (13 mini) cannot start playing loud audio that wakes my sleeping partner!

I do not believe that Apple has employees who actually monitor forum discussions, which is intended to be a user-to-user resource. Having said that, users have been bringing this issue to the attention of Apple “geniuses” for years without any discernible action.

Forum participant since 1994.

@#%* This just happened again and woke up my kids. It hadn’t happened for a few weeks, so I was getting hopeful.

Btw, I confirmed with Apple that they do monitor these discussions. That was one dude with tech support that said that, anyhow, so who knows.

Same problem! But it only started today on my Macbook, I've been using airpods 2 for a couple of years. I was watching youtube, removed my airpods and woke up everybody in the middle of the night because Apple Music started playing :(

This happens to me as well, but not just Apple Music, sometimes it starts playing from a Google Chrome tab where I paused a video on YouTube or something. VERY annoying and interruptive. @Apple - Please identify root cause and share a fix.

I have this exact same issue with my iPhone 13 and iPad with my AirPods Pro. I use Apple Music but not when the issue happens. When I take my AirPods out after using them to play YouTube or something similar and put them in the case Apple Music will start playing a song from the phone speakers I had been listening to, sometimes weeks ago. I have tried to force closing Apple Music to see if that works but that is really a work around, not a solution.

I use my airpods pro for noise reduction, so I often wear them without playing any audio. But EVERY time I remove them, my iPhone begins playing whatever I was last listening to, even if that had been days ago and I had closed that app. I haven't tried turning off ear detection, nor am I going to, because I want that functionality. I just don't want the iPhone to start playing anything at any time unless I tell it to start playing. That seems a reasonable request.

Same thing for me. It has happened whether I have Apple Music subscription or not (I've had it on and off). When I don't have Apple Music subscription, it plays a music on the phone locally.

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 16.3.1

AirPods Pro (Gen 1), model A2084, firmware 5E135

I have the same issue.

I do not subscribe to Apple Music, have not done so for years.

Finish a phone call, remove AirPod Pros and place on desk (not in case) and music starts playing randomly - not all the time.

iPhone 12 Pro Max

IOS 16.5

And this problem is getting worse with each new iOS update. As does the performance of my HomePod and HomePod minis with their bursts of random music and songs stopping with 1 second left (extremely jarring). When this generation of my Apple devices dies in the next year or two (as they tend to do), I will be seriously seeking out non-Apple solutions. I may have to learn Linux but I will not keep giving Apple my money as their products get worse and worse.

That’s unusual, the touch buttons you talk of are force sensors which require a squeeze to activate the button same as the AirPods 3rd Generation, and the force sensors do NOT detect anything if the skin detector hasn’t been triggered. These touch sensors are only on AirPods 1st and 2nd Gen.

I’ll try to be very careful when I take out my AirPods not to click the sensor but I have my doubts that this is problem because, for me, the music randomly starts on a random device when I snap the case closed, not when I take the AirPods out of my ears.

I tried this but for some reason it doesn’t randomly play music when I take the AirPods out alone but turns on randomly when in a group setting. It’s so weird and it was embarrassing when it happened.

This happens about 20% of the time when I'm listening to a podcast with Overcast. I take my AirPods out of my ears and put them in the case. Because I have the volume turned all the way down on my iPhone, I don't notice that it's continuing to play, and I later find all my podcasts are marked as "played".

Very frustrating.

I’m both impressed and appalled by the incompetence of Apple’s software engineers. Any serious dev team would consider this a high priority bug but Apple stopped caring about UX about 3 iOS versions ago so here we are. How are yall not embarrassed?