I've filed feedback FB12003339 for this

It only seems to work if you play the audio strait away with no asynchronous code. I only got it to work with a simple test app that just plays an audio file. however it didn’t always work in my app which needs to fetch audio asynchronously before playing. Don’t know what I’m doing wrong

Still doesn't work for me except under the most narrow of use cases (meaning no asynchronous code between the button press on the widget and the beginning of audio playback).

Actually I take back my last comment. It does seem to work if you start the audio session immediately before running any other code

@kirillram upon further examination, it is actually NOT working for me. It was working when connected to the debugger but when running normally off the debugger, audio playback doesn't work if there is any kind of async task that happens before audio playback starts.

Honestly, I‘m not aware if this was ever fixed. Fortunately I found a workaround and never looked back. My feedback ticket is still open