Apple Music for Android - Chromecast not working

I was able to get mine working by clearing both the Apple Music app cache and the Home app cache.

This issue is so frustrating, and it has been happening for several years at least (since I started using Apple Music). The community-recommended "solution" is to uninstall and reinstall the app, which works better than anything else, but is not 100% reliable, and has the really annoying side effect of requiring you to reconfigure the app from scratch.

When this issue is active and I have the Google Home app open on another device, I can watch all the tracks that are sent from Apple Music to the Chromecast device flicker through almost instantly without playing at all, so the problem seems very likely to be caused by Apple's Chromecast streaming implementation (and it confuses me why an app reinstall would affect that). I expect if they cared at all it would be pretty straightforward to troubleshoot and resolve this, admittedly intermittent, issue. But then again if they cared at all (i.e. didn't actually want to ship a bad experience to Android users) they'd have gapless playback for the Chromecast stream!

I know, seriously. Every time I start casting I have to put stuff in the queue twice, since the first time it just bounces off the Chromecast. I do not understand why they even have an Android app if they don't effectively cover this incredibly common Android use case.

I have wanted to buy an iPad for years, but the dealbreaker for me was not being able to control Chromecast speakers/groups. I've sent multiple emails to Apple over the years telling them: hey, this is the one feature that is keeping me from buying these things. No response, of course, because: Apple. I finally broke down and bought a Pixel Tablet, which is fine, because it does the one thing I require, but it is not what I actually wanted. If this keeps up, it may be I have to go back to Spotify (definitely not what I want), which would be a bit hilarious because I could actually use that with an iPad!

Last night when this issue was happening to me (for a couple hours) I switched to YouTube music. It's definitely a worse experience in the app, but the Chromecast worked flawlessly. Remember when Apple was actually good at creating a software user experience? (iTunes was always a kind of horrific exception, though.)

Hi All, the only sure fire way for me to fix this is to restart the phone. I can then cast Apple Music for some time until the gremlin gets in the way again. I have Galaxy s21. Hope this work around helps until Apple and/or Android and/or Samsung fix the problem 🤪