This iPhone Bluetooth audio issue frustrates me every day, but iOS 26 is finally going to fix it

• The first iOS 26 developer is out now ahead of its public beta launch in July
• One of its upgrades is a new option called 'Keep Audio in Headphones'
• This should reduce auto-switching problems for wireless headphones

If you're tired of your iPhone automatically switching to every other Bluetooth device other than your headphones, then iOS 26 has a treat for you – a new option to make the audio stay connected to your wireless headphones.

As spotted by MacRumors, the new iOS 26 developer beta has a long-awaited new option called "Keep Audio in Headphones" in the iPhone's Settings. The new option will seemingly live in the Settings > General > AirPlay & Continuity section and is specifically designed to stop headphones from making unwanted connections to nearby devices.

Apple's description of the feature says "when using AirPods or other connected headphones, keep audio in your headphones when other playback devices like cars and speakers connect to iPhone."

This happens to me all the time, whether it's my audio automatically switching to in-car speakers or to my iPad when it's being used by someone else. Clearly, I'm not alone in finding this annoyance frustrating, so Apple's thankfully including this new option in iOS 26, and it'll hopefully make it to the software's final release in September.

A bit old in the Bluetooth

Bluetooth is now over 25 years old, so in some ways it's miraculous that the short-range wireless tech works as well as it does – yet it's also frequently frustrating.

Without the option of prioritizing the order of your preferred Bluetooth devices, it can often feel like auto-switching has a mind of its own. So, this setting, while not exactly one of the biggest iOS 26 features, it's definitely a welcome quality-of-life tweak.

Not that it's the only frustrating Bluetooth-related issue we have to grapple with. As our colleagues at What Hi Fi? recently noted, it's high time audio manufacturers started standardizing their Bluetooth pairing processes, too.

Of course, these are very much first-world problems, but at least Bluetooth 6.0 is now rolling out to bring more refinements to the now-ancient tech. These include improved filtering and efficiency, which should bring battery life benefits, along with a feature called Channel Sounding to help improve the accuracy of 'find my device' services from the likes of Apple, Google and Samsung.

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