I'm sorry, but I've been patient long enough. I've suffered through a dozen builds under various Insider 'rings', installed on at least six different phones in varying states of readiness. And there's one bug in Windows 10 Mobile which I just can't keep silent about any longer. And oddly I've not seen anyone else complain about it, at least not yet, which is why I wanted to vent here and check that I'm not totally alone. The issue is that Windows 10 Mobile's pop-up (volume button) media controls are utterly broken.

Well, at least the all-important 'play' one is. Here's the scenario (and I can't believe it's not common for many others, day to day):

1. You start some music or a podcast going and listen for a bit
2. Real life intervenes and you pause said music or podcast
3. You do something else on your Windows 10 Mobile smartphone (e.g. check Twitter) and then put your phone down
4. Time goes by (a few minutes is enough)
5. You decide to resume your music or podcast, so you power on the screen and use the volume buttons to bring up the system media controls. There, in plain sight, is the name of your track or podcast, with a big 'Play' icon slap band in the middle.
6. You tap on the 'Play' icon and... nothing happens.
7. You tap again on the icon and only then your music or podcast resumes (along with some disconcerting flickering of the icon)

Now, I appreciate that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here and that it's 'only one extra tap'. But it's a tap that's utterly disruptive because it breaks the experience. Sometimes the audio will resume on the first tap of the control. Most of the time it just... doesn't. And you never know which way it's going to go, so you tap once, hopefully. And then realise that the icon hasn't changed and that sound isn't filling your ears and so you have to reach down and tap again.

It's just jarring.

I've reported this three times now via Microsoft's Feedback hub and there wasn't significant upvoting, nor any fix implemented in any of the Fast, Slow or Release Preview builds, and this bug has been there in the OS for at least a YEAR now.

Am I the only person who uses the volume buttons and pop-up controls in this way? Has no one else ever noticed this UI breakdown and got annoyed? In my case, about 20 times a day. Every day. It's enough to drive a person to Android or iOS, which both let you resume music or podcasts without a chasm of uncertainty.... Or even back to 'good ol' (with hindsight) Windows Phone 8.1, which at least let you keep the tracks and podcasts rolling smoothly....

Harumph.

Comments welcome! Is it just me? Have you been plagued by this longstanding bug too? Anyone from Micrsoft reading this and feel like explaining why the bug's still there after 12 months of reporting?

UPDATE: Nov 2016: Microsoft has finally fixed this issue in the latest Fast ring Insiders build, 14959. The issue was to do with the application associated with the audio stream being mistakenly killed and it has now been fixed. That's the good news. The bad news is that those on production W10M devices won't get this fix until the Creators Update (Redstone 2) ships in March 2017!

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PS. Just a supplementary screenshot below that has no bearing on the broken 'Play' issue, but demonstrates for the umpteenth time that things are not well below the surface of Windows 10 in terms of apps passing media locations to the OS. Gah.