Bug 219846 – html audio tag playback fails randomly. Especially on iOS 14.2 Safari

• Status: NEW
• Component: DOM

[Glossika]

Our audio player uses React and the html audio tag for playback. Most songs are 2-3 seconds long, 
some songs are up to 10 seconds long. Audio sources are retrieved from a CDN and songs are changed by swapping the "src" URLs. Songs fail to play during a song, 
after changing songs, almost randomly. When playback fails, reloading the page does not fix the problem. 
The page must be closed, phone restarted, and website opened in new Private window.

Devices affected:
- many devices that worked fine. Start having this error after upgrading to iOS 14
- Multiple iOS 13 devices
- Multiple iOS 14 devices
- No particular pattern to devices
- more prevalent on iOS 14 devices
- devices that have failures, always fail
- devices that play fine, never fail

Devices NOT affected:
- Desktop
- Android

Songs fail almost randomly in different situations:
- Playback can fail at any point before a song ends.
- Playback can fail after changing songs.

Error message on failure:
NotSupportedError: The operation is not supported.

Reproduce Error:
- Devices that fail always seem to fail.
- Devices that work can not reproduce the error.

Workaround:
- Delete iOS homepage shortcut if it exists (must be deleted)
- Close page
- Restart phone
- Open new Private tab in Safari
- Login and playback will work again

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/72366967>