[Android] notification is missing skip (±15s) buttons and the Previous button in a playlist

[FedericaGonzalez03]

Describe the Bug

On Android, two remote-control buttons are missing from the notification / lock screen (both work fine on iOS):

1. The skip forward / backward (±15s) buttons never appear while the app is in the background.
2. In a playlist (multi-track queue), only the Next button ever appears — the Previous button never shows, on any track (not just the first one). This used to work on v4, where I managed the Previous/Next controls manually (updating capabilities per track); after migrating to v5 the Previous button stopped showing up in the notification even when it's included in capabilities.

Steps To Reproduce

Issue 1 — skip buttons:

1. Set up a single track with skip commands:

TrackPlayer.setCommands({
  capabilities: [PlayerCommand.PlayPause, PlayerCommand.Seek, PlayerCommand.SkipForward, PlayerCommand.SkipBackward],
  forwardInterval: 15,
  backwardInterval: 15,
});

2. Start playback, send the app to the background, and look at the notification / lock screen.
3. → The ±15s skip buttons are not shown (only play/pause). On iOS they appear correctly.

Issue 2 — Previous button in a playlist:

1. Set up a queue with several tracks:

TrackPlayer.setCommands({
  capabilities: [PlayerCommand.PlayPause, PlayerCommand.Seek, PlayerCommand.Previous, PlayerCommand.Next],
});

2. Start playback and skip to the 2nd or 3rd track.
3. Look at the notification / lock screen.
4. → Only Next is shown. Previous never appears, even when there is a previous track in the queue and Previous is set in capabilities. On iOS both appear correctly. This worked on v4 (I was updating the Previous/Next capabilities manually per track); it broke after upgrading to v5.

Environment Info:

• Output of npx react-native info:

System:
  OS: macOS 26.5.1
Binaries:
  Node: 22.20.0
  Yarn: 1.22.22
  npm: 10.9.3
IDEs:
  Android Studio: 2025.1
Languages:
  Java: 17.0.17
npmPackages:
  react: 19.2.4
  react-native: 0.86.2
Android:
  hermesEnabled: true
  newArchEnabled: true

• @rntp/player version: 5.8.0
• Real device or simulator: Real device

[luciaquagliata]

+1

[dcvz]

Thanks for the report! We'll look into it

[samirhassen]

We hit issue 1 on a spoken-word news app (read-aloud articles), and dug into the Media3 side. Sharing the root cause in case it saves you time — it is not a bug in how capabilities are handled, it is a missing Media3 call.

Why the skip buttons never appear

SkipForward/SkipBackward correctly become Player.COMMAND_SEEK_FORWARD / COMMAND_SEEK_BACK, so the commands are available. But Media3 never renders those commands as notification buttons on its own:

• DefaultMediaNotificationProvider.getMediaButtons only ever puts Previous/Next in its back and forward slots. A seek-back/forward command is not a candidate for those slots unless a CommandButton explicitly claims them.
• On Android 13+ the system controls are drawn from the platform PlaybackState, where ACTION_REWIND / ACTION_FAST_FORWARD are not rendered as buttons at all. The skip buttons have to be published as custom actions, which Media3 only does for buttons in the media button preferences.

So no ordering of capabilities and no combination of commands can surface them — the player never declares media button preferences, and a MediaSession with none falls back to the default Previous/PlayPause/Next layout.

What fixes it

Declaring media button preferences on the session (MediaSession.Builder.setMediaButtonPreferences, plus ConnectionResult.AcceptedResultBuilder.setMediaButtonPreferences in onConnect, and MediaSession.setMediaButtonPreferences when commands are updated at runtime), with two CommandButtons:

• CommandButton.ICON_SKIP_BACK_15 (or the 5/10/30 variants, chosen from backwardInterval), .setPlayerCommand(Player.COMMAND_SEEK_BACK), .setSlots(CommandButton.SLOT_BACK)
• the mirror image with ICON_SKIP_FORWARD_*, COMMAND_SEEK_FORWARD, SLOT_FORWARD

Media3 then strips ACTION_SKIP_TO_PREVIOUS/NEXT from the platform PlaybackState for the claimed slots (MediaSessionLegacyStub) and publishes the skip buttons as custom actions, so Android 13+ draws them. Previous/Next can still be offered in SLOT_OVERFLOW, where Media3 converts them back into the real player commands on press, so JS-handled Previous keeps working.

One detail worth guarding: an overflow Previous/Next should only be added when a skip button actually claimed that slot. Otherwise Media3 fills the free slot with its own button and the same control is rendered twice.

Verified with a locally patched 5.8.0 on a Pixel 9 emulator (Android 17): lock screen and notification show -15 | play/pause | +15 | prev | next, and the skip buttons seek exactly the configured interval with app state staying in sync. Returning an empty preferences list when neither skip command is enabled keeps the current default layout untouched, so this can ship without changing behaviour for existing apps.

Happy to share our patch privately if that helps — not posting it here since it is your licensed source.

On issue 2 (Previous never shows): we did not reproduce that one, so this is only a hypothesis — Media3 intersects the session's available commands with what the player reports, and ExoPlayer's COMMAND_SEEK_TO_PREVIOUS_MEDIA_ITEM depends on the current timeline. Worth checking whether the native queue actually contains the preceding item at that moment, independently of the capabilities list.