Unity already gives music-playing app developers the very cool
opportunity to integrate with the Music menu, giving the user the
ability to control playback from a consistent UI. However, we could
improve the experience more by taking it another step.
Unity can offer apps an API to pass music playback off to a background
process. If the music-playing app crashes, stalls, or needs to be
restarted, the playback will continue unaffected. On startup, the
music app receives user data from Unity saying that playback is in
progress at position I:JK, allowing a seamless continuation. While
this is perhaps a corner case on desktops, where software is designed
never to stall or restart (but we're looking at you, Firefox), it's an
important user case on mobile devices where the operating system will
intentionally suspend applications in order to conserve power and
memory.
When we think about our daring 13.04 release, let's plan on taking the
music user experience in a resilient, gap-less direction.
