Music Controls with iPhones behaviour appears to have changed

I've noticed that the behaviour of the Music Controls appears to have changed recently but I don't know if it happened with 8.00 or even if it is the Mk1 working differently.  It is possible this was a change on the iOS side of things but I'm wondering if others have seen it.  I am trying a few things to see if I can work out where the change occurred.

I have a large playlist with over 400 songs. My aim was to manually start the playlist on my iPhone, shuffled, and then play the complete playlist until it was done, over multiple days/weeks.  Each time I get in the car or I'm on the train, I could use Music Controls and hit play for it to start where it left off.  I was doing this with my vivoactve even before I got my Mk1 and it worked well except for a long term unresolved bug on iPhones. Basically, after a while the iPhone starts playing songs that have already played. and I'd have to start again.

I could restart the playlist on the same day, a day later, a week later, etc. just as long as I didn't close the music app on the phone.

I then came up with a solution for the repeated songs.  I shuffled the playlist outside iTunes and then just played the already shuffled playlist and I'd get no repeats.

This worked well for a few months but recently something changed.  Often now when I press Play in music controls, instead of picking up where it left off, it starts playing the playlist in alphabetical order by artist. If I check the Music app on my phone before I play, it has the correct song queued up so I don't understand why it isn't working.

I realise this is a fairly convoluted use case but I was wondering if any other Mk1 users had seen this or something similar.

I will try other methods of pressing play to see if it happens elsewhere and so it isn't an Mk1 problem.