When I open Anki on my Mac while listening to audio on my iPhone through AirPods, the AirPods switch to the Mac. This happens even when I remain on the deck list without reviewing cards or playing any audio in Anki.
I also tried starting Anki in safe mode by holding Shift, as recommended in the troubleshooting documentation, and the same behavior occurred.
I would expect automatic switching when Anki actually plays audio, but not simply when I open the app. Is this intended behavior?
I searched the forum and found reports about AirPods playback delays and clipped audio, but did not find a matching report about switching on startup.
Environment
Anki: 26.09.3 (29bb700b)
macOS: 27.0 (26A428)
AirPods: AirPods Pro 2 (Lightning)
iOS: 27.0.1
AirPods automatic switching: enabled
Steps to reproduce
Connect AirPods to the iPhone and start playing audio.
Open Anki on the Mac.
Stay on the deck list without reviewing cards or playing audio.
The AirPods switch from the iPhone to the Mac.
The same behavior occurs when starting Anki in safe mode with Shift held down.
I don’t have AirPods to be able to test this. I did try testing with ordinary bluetooth speakers. However, the behavior doesn’t occur with them because, once connected, my bluetooth speakers don’t switch devices. I imagine that AirPods and/or the iOS/macOS infrastructure has additional technology/functionality that allows for easy device switching. I’m not sure how it works.
If I had to guess, it might be that Anki is initializing/testing its audio player upon startup, triggering the device switch.
When I open Anki on my Mac while listening to audio on my iPhone through AirPods, the AirPods switch to the Mac. This happens even when I remain on the deck list without reviewing cards or playing any audio in Anki.
I also tried starting Anki in safe mode by holding Shift, as recommended in the troubleshooting documentation, and the same behavior occurred.
I would expect automatic switching when Anki actually plays audio, but not simply when I open the app. Is this intended behavior?
I searched the forum and found reports about AirPods playback delays and clipped audio, but did not find a matching report about switching on startup.
Environment
Anki: 26.09.3 (29bb700b)
macOS: 27.0 (26A428)
AirPods: AirPods Pro 2 (Lightning)
iOS: 27.0.1
AirPods automatic switching: enabled
Steps to reproduce
Connect AirPods to the iPhone and start playing audio.
Open Anki on the Mac.
Stay on the deck list without reviewing cards or playing audio.
The AirPods switch from the iPhone to the Mac.
The same behavior occurs when starting Anki in safe mode with Shift held down.
I am experiencing the same bug on 26.09.4 / macOS 27.2. Every time I open Anki, it hijacks the audio that is streaming from my phone to my AirPods and I have to go in and manually switch the playback back onto my phone.
Preface: I’m not one of the Anki devs, but I spent a bit of time looking into this (it’s happened to me as well). Here’s what I found:
When Anki starts, it launches mpv in the background (mpv is a free, open-source media player that Anki bundles to play audio and video on your cards). The copy of mpv included with 26.09.x tells macOS “I’m a media player” as soon as it starts, even though nothing is playing yet. AirPods see that and switch over to the Mac.
It looks like this is already fixed in Anki’s development code: the newer build of mpv that Anki bundles has that feature turned off. So AirPods should stay on peoples’ iPhone. It just hasn’t made it into a release yet. 26.09.4 was built without the updated audio package, so it still has the problem.