I have been receiving complaints from users of my application that have the HTC Hero. The HTC media player on this phone always intercepts the Bluetooth media buttons. I searched the development forum and found this post:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/a27230c978cc9e24 which discusses this same issue and was posted in October 2009. Does anyone know how to work around this problem? Even registering the broadcast receiver at the highest priority still fails to receive the Bluetooth media button events on the HTC Hero phone. The Bluetooth media button registration code works fine on the other Android phones that I have tested. Apparently this isn't the first time HTC has done something like this, as I also found a report of a similar problem on one of the HTC Microsoft Mobile Devices reported here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=451505 It seems extremely short sighted of HTC to code their media player so that it grabs the Bluetooth AVRCP media button events in such a way that other applications are unable to work with the Bluetooth head phone buttons and Bluetooth in car stereo systems. The Android broadcast receiver registration has a nice priority system to allow sharing of the broadcast events. Unless the user has actually started the media player, grabbing the Bluetooth media button broadcast events at a high priority seems to be very bad form. Users don't always want to use the HTC media player. In my case, my application is an audiobook player which provides a very different set of features than the HTC media player, and when people are trying to listen to an audiobook they don't want the HTC media player intercepting all the commands. When it does this there are two players playing at the same time which just produces an audio mess. My application only registers to get the Bluetooth AVRCP events while it is running. When the user exits the audiobook player, the application unregisters. This allows the Bluetooth commands to be shared by a variety of different applications. I can see HTC wanting to leave their default media player registered in the background, so it gets the Bluetooth AVRCP commands if the user has not explicitly loaded any other media player. But they should have done it at a priority level below 0 just like the default Android media player does on the other Android phones. Does anyone know if there is a way to work around this poor behavior of the HTC media player on the HTC Hero phones? Or does everyone that wants to have their Bluetooth headphones and Bluetooth in car stereo buttons work properly just need to completely avoid the HTC Hero phone?
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