How do I detect if any audio track is playing on iOS (not just Music)?

Questions & Answers
1

I am trying to get my game to detect if an iPhone is playing any other audio tracks at all so that I can turn off the game music so as not to overlap and annoy the user. Also if the user is playing no tracks, I would like to raise my music levels up. To be clear, people have asked this question before regarding iPod music (i.e. Detecting ipod music playback - Unity Answers) but it turns out that this solution DOES NOT DETECT when the Podcast app is playing audio. It only detects if the Music app is playing music. I’ve tried it myself and what I say is true.

So my question is, how can I reliably test if the user is playing Music, Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, etc etc etc? Also, please guide me as to how you were able to research this information so that I know where to find this stuff in the future without having to ask. I’m still very new to native plugins and objective-c, etc.

P.S. If you want a perfect example, Candy Crush is able to shut its own music down whether the user is playing Podcast or Music or Pandora. So it is definitely possible.

2

I am not able to answer my own question because I’m waiting for a moderator to approve it in the first place. That seems silly. But here it is:

 BOOL isOtherAudioPlaying = [[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] isOtherAudioPlaying];

This works to detect every application but there seems to be an iOS bug where it will always return “True” that a track is playing specifically if the Podcast app has been paused with the headset button. It correctly returns “False” if the Pandora app is paused with the headset. I don’t see this as fixable …