Apple Watch 2 Alert Sounds Stop Music Playing on iPhone

[Buadhai]

Watch 2 - WatchOS 6.2.8
iPhone XR - 13.6.1

When I'm cycling in the morning I use my watch to track the workout and listen to music playing on my iPhone via AirPods.

This morning a strange thing happened. Whenever my watch played an alert sound (at each 5K split, for example) it played through the AirPods instead of through the watch's tiny speaker. The alert sound caused music to stop playing on the iPhone. The only way to get the music playing again was to haul the iPhone out of my bike bag and press the play button on the screen. (It really surprised me that two devices could play through a single pair of AirPods.)

After I finished cycling I could not figure out a way to turn this "feature" off. So, I did a force reboot of the watch.

Question: What did I do to turn this feature on and how do I turn it off short of rebooting the watch?

 

[mk313]

I’ve had issues like this in the past. I’ve always fixed them by restarting the watch.

 

[Buadhai]

I’ve had issues like this in the past. I’ve always fixed them by restarting the watch.

Sure. That works. But when you're in the middle of a workout do you really want to stop and abandon the workout so you can restart the watch?

There ought to be a better way.

 

[mk313]

There ought to be a better way but I haven’t found one. I had a ton of issues with my series 2 when running. The issues always seemed to crop up while exercising. It got to the point where I put a reminder in my calendar to restart every week. Since I started doing that, I never had another issue. I’ve since upgraded to a 3 and now a 5 and still restart every Friday. It’s a bit of a hassle but way better than losing music during a run or having my workout app crash on the middle of a run.