Is there any way to distinguish in the iOS app a situation that someone have changed volume by hardware buttons on iPhone/iPad from the situation that it has been done by so
You might want to have a look at the private API. rpetrich did some research again.. :) click here
But you need to know that this is not really a good idea because apple probably will reject your app when accessing private apis.
After a long search I came up with this:
There is no way to detect hardware button been pressed (so far iOS 7). You can only be informed with the result - volume changed. It means that the only solution will be to properly handle situation when the volume change is triggered by some UI component.