At some point last year my Google Nexus 5 stopped playing the voicemail WAV files sent to my corporate Exchange account. The error in the second image may vary slightly (video vs. audio file) but the net result is the same… can’t play the message.
By default the phone tries to use Google Music Play as the app to open these WAV files. When I first got the phone these files played fine right out of my email but at some point this stopped working. I didn’t think much of it until recently. I upgraded to Lollipop sometime in Nov 2014 and apparently this updated OS didn’t fix the issue either so I set out to find a solution to this problem the other day.
The thread posted here had some valuable tips which eventually led to me finding a solution to my issue. Many users suggested that rolling back the Google Music Play to the factory version (uninstall updates) fixed their problem but this solution offered me no relief. I suspect that whatever broke Music Play was now a permanent part of the Lollipop OS.
I did find that some users had downloaded a free app called Remote Wave Free by Yongtao Wang. I downloaded the app and tried to open a voicemail WAV file from my email, selecting Remote Wave as the default app when prompted. Voila! I can now listen to my voicemails directly out of my email again!
The app is pretty simple and lightweight too at just over 572KB. There is another product called WavPlayer that was recommended as well for 99₵ but hey, free is “free”. In a perfect world Google Music Play would work as expected but this is a pretty good solution for those of you plagued with this issue.