How to troubleshoot iphone bluetooth with my 2013 Mazda 3

January 31, 2024 1:38 PM

I have a 2013 Mazda 3. I like to use my iPhone to listen to music through the car's sound system. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I can't seem to see any pattern at all- Sometimes I start the car, and instantly, with even wanting to, a podcast starts playing through the car speakers. Sometimes, no matter what I do, I can't get phone audio to come out the sound system. Any ideas what I can try to troubleshoot it, to make it work consistently?

When it doesn't work, what seems to happen is - the phone things it's paired with the car, the car thinks the phone is paired with it. But no sound comes out of the speakers.

A source of some confusion to me: It looks like the phone can connect to the car in multiple ways - via bluetooth, via USB, and maybe some other way?

posted by ManInSuit to Technology (7 answers total)

At the risk of asking a dumb question, is the volume up in both the car and on the phone? Sometimes my car mysteriously sets my phone volume to 0 when connecting via bluetooth.

Does your car possibly also think it’s paired with some other speaker in your house? I’ve also had this happen when my phone stayed paired to my Alexa speaker inside.

Have you tried making your car “forget this device”, making your phone forget your car, and then re-connecting via bluetooth?

These are the only suggestions I can think of. I also have a 2013 vehicle that had wonky connections via bluetooth - and my eventual solution was to buy and install a new car stereo with more modern tech.
posted by invincible summer at 2:06 PM on January 31

2017 CX5 owner w/ android phone, also sometimes have connection issues. To make things work via bluetooth when they aren't, I typically have to cycle the phone's bluetooth connection off/on and may have to be in park to pair. Phone can definitely connect both via bluetooth and usb and the car's system tends to remember which was last used, which also complicates the connection issue.

Have also experienced the volume and pairing to other devices issues mentioned by invincible summer.
posted by pappy at 2:09 PM on January 31

How old is your iPhone? Because I have a similar problem when I bring my older iPhone into a newer car. Basically if the Bluetooth is on *and* the phone is plugged into the car via USB to charge, then some kind of confusion will happen every so often and the car will believe the connection is severed and ignore the phone, but the phone will not realize this and keep “playing” the audio through the car (while actually the car isn’t playing anything).

My best workarounds have been to either turn off Bluetooth on the phone to encourage the USB connection to be primary, or to not plug the phone into USB but rather to charge via the cigarette lighter or not at all.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:22 PM on January 31 [2 favorites]

2022 Miata owner. Own a brand-new iPhone. Have the same issue. Connection is spotty all of the time, no matter how it's connected (bluetooth or cable). It's annoying af. In fact, it's the only real bad thing about the Miata. But the entertainment system is just awful. Constant connection problems. I've just come to accept that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and there's no real discernible pattern to it all. Makes me want to do an after-market Carplay install instead of the default.
posted by jdroth at 4:39 PM on January 31

I have a noticed a similar issue in my 2013 Mazda 3 within the past three months that seems to be getting worse. Notably if the phone is charging, the Bluetooth connection almost never works. This morning I couldn’t get the Bluetooth connection to work — kept saying “this device is not supported”. Much to my surprise, when I joined a Teams meeting the audio connected via Bluetooth. I will be watching this thread with interest…
posted by wearyaswater at 6:00 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]

Something you might try is to look up the manual for your car and get into the interface that tells you what Bluetooth connections are stored in the radio. For all we know it could be trying those in sequence when yours flubs the handshake or something. There may well be a Bluetooth version problem too. Few of these radio units are good, but I've found that stepping through the settings you can sometimes find helpful things like the stored-phone list.

Considering how bad these systems generally are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a toggle that's like "randomly stop playing" or something.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:00 PM on January 31

I have a small bit of advice here

Generally most cars, when connecting to bluetooth, will see the connection is successful and automatically send the "play" command to the connecting device.

Iphones, when they receive a random "play" command, have a bit of an order they play things in. It's something like - "resume/play last opened app that is active in memory". iPhones kill off apps in the background using an alogrythm, and the podcasts app is pretty "lightweight". So, it's possible that the podcasts app is the "latest last opened app active in memory". And - just shutting the app (by swiping up, then swiping the app up) isn't enough to overpower that algorythm.

This used to happen to me with the apple music app, where it would start playing that even though I preferred spotify. And, to solve it, I uninstalled the apple music app entirely. Now it plays spotify! (usually).

Unfortunately, the desire to not have your stereo send that "play" command to your phone, and how the phone interprets that command, are both a little hard to tackle.

But - I have seen people have luck setting up a personal automation to run when your phone connects to a specific Bluetooth device. Then have that shortcut open an app, and make sure you uncheck ask before running. If you have that open spotify or music or whatever, then the audio should switch (hopefully without too much podcast annoyance).
posted by bbqturtle at 5:47 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]