This has been driving me nuts for a while now and I finally figured out what’s going on and how to fix it.

TL;DR

If you find that the option in the Audible app to ‘Connect to a Device’ does not appear as you might expect then it seems this can be caused by another app blocking the underlying resource. This is likely another app that features the ability to stream via Chromecast. ‘Force Stop’ your other running media apps until the option reappers in Audible.

Connect to a ‘whatnow’?

Around sometime in November 2022 I noticed that the Audible app on my Android device began to offer an option to ‘Connect to a Device’ and I quickly became dependent on this function to play bedtime stories on my kids’ Google Home devices. You can read more about the feature here.

Over time I noticed however that it was a bit ‘flaky’. Sometimes it just wouldn’t appear, and with zero indication of why or even if the feature should be there at all!

Over the same period of time however my kids were becoming more and more expecting of being able to hear the latest and greatest story as part of a bedtime routine evolving out of my control. The flakiness started to become a real… pain in the… ahem!

Solution!

Over many frustrating nights, sometimes spending up to 30 minutes trying every possible incantation imaginable, I started to identify that there were certain things that worked to restore the feature. Ultimately I found that in my case all I need to do is use the Android ‘FORCE STOP’ feature on the YouTube Music app.

It seems that YouTube Music takes some sort of ownership of the underlying Chromecast resources and prevents other apps from using it. I suspect this could also be caused by other Chromecast-capable apps including Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, etc. Shouldn’t take you too long to have a look through your apps list and see which ones are running (TIP: If ‘FORCE STOP’ is greyed out then this is a reliable indicator that the app is not active and so is unlikely the culprit) then stopping each one and restarting the Audible app to see if the feature reappears.

Please let me know if you have any success with this! Or not… I’m interested to learn how this feature behaves 🤓 Good luck!