I've got an older iHome iPhone dock model which, among other things, has an alarm clock feature that I use regularly with my iPhone 4S. My standard procedure for setting my alarm is this: I open the app I want to play as an alarm, then lock the phone, then put it in the dock. Most of the times, this works well: at the alarm time, the app gets the play signal from the dock, and the app in the foreground starts playing music.
However, with some web radio apps (especially bad with the app of the otherwise fantastic Radio Paradise), this fails often - though not always. The app is in the foreground when I dock the phone (and stays there - no crash), when I press play on the dock just after docking to test it, the right app starts playing, but the music that starts playing in the morning is that from the phone's standard music player, even though it was not even running before.
What could be the source of this behavior, and how can I avoid it?
I suspect the following things:
- It's not relevant where the play signal comes from, be it a dock or the headset remote (though I only have experience with the dock)
- It has something to do with the delay of loading/buffering the web radio stream, and somehow the phone just handing over to the standard app after some sort of timeout
