A few updates ago, Niantic introduced a bug into Pokémon GO that’s one of the more irritating in the game’s history, and this game has had a lot of annoying bugs.
On iOS, when the game is open, it automatically cuts the volume of whatever audio your device is playing by about half, music, podcasts or what have you. This is supposedly a problem with Unity, and Niantic keeps saying that it will be fixed in a future update, but it’s been months now and nothing has changed.
If you’re like me, you have probably muted Pokémon GO’s repetitive music by this point and maybe even the sound effects too, and usually walk around while playing your own music or audio. This bug makes that really annoying, because the obvious fix, cranking up the volume to compensate, will get your eardrums melted as soon as you click out of the app and volume is restored to a deafening volume.
As it turns out, there are a few solutions to this problem online, all of which are temporary, but more viable than the alternatives and certainly better than nothing. Not all may work for you, as it may depend on your version and the apps you’re using, but at least one of these should work for you.
The Camera Trick
Found this one on reddit, First you:
- Open Pokémon GO, hear the volume cut
- Swipe up from the bottom to bring up the iOS menu, choose camera
- Sound will return to normal volume. Now switch back to Pokémon GO, and after a short delay, volume should remain normal
The Pause Trick
This one didn’t work for me, but it’s the easiest one by far, and supposedly should work for some.
- Simply pause and unpause your music, either from the swipe menu, or from your headphones itself, if it has that capability. This might reset the volume that way.
The Back/Forward Trick
This one I’ve gotten to work 100% of the time.
- From the swipe menu (swipe up from bottom, then left), press forward or backward to reset a track or skip to a new one. This should reset the volume every time.
The problem will all of these is as that as soon as you go outside the Pokémon GO app and then back in again, the sound problem will return. It’s not a permanent fix. So it works best for longer sessions where you’re listening to a lot of music in a row, or a really long podcast. But again, getting even one reset is enough to make a big difference.
This bug is the worst because listening to music while walking and play PoGo is pretty fundamental to the experience. Hopefully Niantic will come out with an actual fix for this any day, but I wish I had known these temporary fixes sooner, as that would have helped at least a little bit. Hopefully it might be able to help you.
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