How to stop Bluetooth auto play feature when connecting your phone to your car.

Last year I bought a Toyota car that came with the Toyota Entune system. In the first few hours of owning the car, I tried pairing my HTC One M8 to it so I could stream my music via BlueTooth and it worked pretty well. I could finally abandon my AUX cable and life was good.

Then after a few days, I started finding a few annoyances, for example, I found out that every time I got in my car, Entune would send a "play" signal to my phone during pairing and my phone would start playing music without me asking for it. I would see myself turning the radio off as soon as I got in the car every single time.

While turning the radio off solved the problem, it also broke other things like google maps for navigation or any other app that streams sounds via Bluetooth. I want to hear the navigation directions so turning off the radio also killed that option.

A few months go by and I'm really fed up with the way this works. I scheduled a visit @ my Toyota dealer and ask them to update my Entune software thinking that they would have issued a fix or at least an option to disable that "feature". To my disappointment, there was no fix to the problem. As soon as I got in the car after the update, my phone started playing music automatically and there was no option to disable it. I even called the Entune support line and asked if there was anything that I was missing but nothing was suggested.

That was the time I started searching for an alternate solution to the problem. Entune wasn't going to fix it, so I had to find a fix myself. I even thought about writing something for Android to prevent the auto play feature, but before I sat down to code it, I found a few posts online that were promising.

During my research, I found out that many people had the same issue and it dated back a few years including the first Entune versions. I found many threads with people complaining about the problem.

After trying many apps and ideas, the solution that solved the problem for me is the following:

You need the following apps installed on your phone:

1. Media Button Router
2. Disable Autoplay

Once you have those 2 apps installed on your phone, open Media Button Router and deselect all auto play apps except Disable Autoplay. This will make sure that the only app triggered during the Bluetooth pairing with your car is the Disable Autoplay app.

Also, in Disable Autoplay, select click on "Disable Media Button".

This is all there's to it. Now, every time I get in my car, my music doesn't auto play anymore but things like navigation directions or streaming works without any manual intervention.

I hope this helps anybody who'd been having problems with their Entune system or any other Bluetooth system that insists in auto playing music every time you connect to it.

Until next time...

***** Update *****

There's now a better and simpler way to stop autoplay on Bluetooth connect:

Bluetooth Connect & Stop Play

On my new phone (Google Pixel XL) it works flawlessly while the previous solution doesn't work anymore... 😜