ArcGIS StoryMaps- Audio not playing/broken on iOS devices

[Amanda__Huber]

Hey StoryMaps team and @OwenGeo , 

We recently found an issue where a core of our Audio files in our StoryMaps are no longer playing and are greyed out when viewing on an iPhone/iOS device across Safari and Chrome browsers. I tested on Android and have not seen any issues. I am currently using iOS 17.5.1 and is reproducable across iPhones and iPads. My colleagues have tested on their iOS devices as well and also are encountering issues. 

When viewing in the browser there are no issues playing the audio, and when previewing the StoryMap in "mobile mode" we don't see issues, but when opening the published story on iOS it's broken: 

This issue is affecting three of our public facing StoryMaps. We have opened an Esri support cases,  #03679820. 

Here's a copy of one of the StoryMaps affected (we created a copy so we can fix the production ones: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9340027d0b594910af3a9e89e548a021)

Hopefully if anyone else is seeing this issue they'll also come across this thread. 

Thanks, 

Amanda Huber

[OwenGeo]

@Amanda__Huber - Thank you for reporting this issue. We will look into it and share an update here when we have one.

[AravindStoryMaps · Accepted solution]

Summary of the issue:

We observed that the audio files added in the storymap in question were actually of mime type: video/mp4 and not audio/m4a even though the file formats were defined as so. The mime type (video/mp4) was not supported on iOS device. After converting one of these files to a mp3 file, we confirmed that adding this new converted file in the storymap works correctly.

We're happy to take a look into this further if you're still seeing any issues, @Amanda__Huber.