iOS 7+ AVAudioPlayer from phone's Internal Ear Piece - ios

Question

I'm trying to figure how i can play audio using AVAudioPlayer to the phone's internal ear piece.
When headphones are connected the audio should play on those else it must play from internal ear piece (AVAudioPlayer should never play from Phone's Bottom Speaker).
Is there any way to achieve this? iOS 7+ answers are welcome!

Answer 1

It's interesting to see how many more answers there are regarding Android questions, iOS questions are much less answered.
This is the solution that i managed to find:
NSError *error;
// Initialize Audio Player
_player = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc]initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:_audioPath] error:&error];
// Set Audio Session to "Play and Record", UNFORTUNATELY this is the only way to play
// from the internal speaker. It asks the user to grant Recording permission to the app.
NSError *setCategoryError = nil;
[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setCategory:AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord error: &setCategoryError];
[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setActive: YES error: nil];
if (setCategoryError) {
CLS_LOG(#"Error routing audio: %#",setCategoryError);
[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}
[_player prepareToPlay];
// And now you can play from the internal speaker.
You can see that i had to use AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord because it's the only category that routes the audio to the receiver (the small speaker you hold to your ear when on a phone call) see the audio session programming guide for reference.
Actually, there is a method named overrideOutputAudioPort:error: that looks promising but it can only be used AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord to force the device to use the external speaker, and not vice versa.