Audio playback stuttering/skipping iOS11.4

I’ve had this issue for probably a year or more. It originally began happening on my 7 plus and the problem followed me through several new phones, an 8 plus, which I brought to the Apple store and they replaced. The issue started happening again with the new 8 plus and I switched to an IPhone X a few months ago and the issue has started happening again and it’s really really bad now. Oddly it doesn’t happen on my Bluetooth headphones or AirPods, but It skips and stutters like crazy when playing any audio over Bluetooth to my Anker Soundcore 2 speaker. I’ve tried wiping my phone and setting it up as a new phone but nothing works. By comparison by wife’s 7 plus and my iPad stream to my Bluetooth speaker flawlessly with no issues. I think the issue lies in the software somewhere and every time I back up my phone to the cloud the issue is being saved hence this happening to several phones. I thought the issue might be interference from some other device on my network running on the 2.4GHZ band but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t know what else to do but I am at the point where I am on the verge of switching to a Samsung.

Posting this to keep the thread alive. I've been having the problem on all audio (my music files are burned from CD and reside on my phone), including phone calls. I used wired ear buds most of the time. I run my business on my phone and the issue on phone calls is especially frustrating.

I've just turned off "background app refresh" and will see if that makes a difference.

After disabling screen time, the skipping has dropped down dramatically. Oddly enough the orientation of the phone seems to matter too. If the phone is upside down it seems to skip less. Thanks to the folks that posted those suggestions in this thread.

After some more testing, I only seem to have the skipping with bluetooth issue on my 2012 Camry and it doesn't skip at all with my 2017 Sienna. I guess the version of bluetooth on the Camry is older than what the Xr has. Unfortunately, there has never been a firmware update offered for my Camry's radio (it's the non Entune version) and I doubt there ever will be an update.

After disabling screen time and adjusting orientation, it may only skip a couple of times in a half an hour instead of nearly constantly.

very frustrating. My last phone 6s and my current phone 8s both had the exact same problem as well so i was very convinced it wasn’t my headphone jack as well. I’m still shocked cleaning out the headphone jack worked for, me but sounds like you have a totally different issue. Good luck. I would be furious.

I have this issue too.

Is there any resolution?

Doesn’t work on my iPhone 6s. The only solution I’ve found is to close all other apps completely while trying to play music from the iPhone.

Scratch that. Even my solution no longer works. Come on, Apple! This is ridiculous. Mac guy for 25 years and this is a whopper of a bug. Stupid really.

i have similar problems. no sound in timer or calendar alerts. also new chase app no longer seems to have support for touch id with is 11.4.1

If that is the problem the embarresment is almost bigger.

I havent had it set up. I use Spotify. Ofcourse :)

But now I deleted the Apple music app all together.