Unsurprisingly, Spotify is taking its sweet time to bring native support for the music streaming service on HomePod. With the release of iOS 14 last year, Apple announced that third-party audio apps will be able to natively work on the HomePod. Apps such as Amazon Music, Deezer, Pandora, and iHeartRadio all have native support for the smart speaker.
With native support, users can choose their default music and podcasting apps. What does that entail? It means when you say, “Hey Siri, play the latest Adele album,” Siri will automatically pick your streaming service instead of Apple Music. Of course, you can always AirPlay from your iPhone or iPad. But that’s not ideal because the music will stop playing if the device AirPlaying to the HomePod leaves the network.
Well, it’s been over a year and native support from Spotify, the number one streaming service by subscriber count, still hasn’t added support. Quite a few users on the Spotify forum (via MacRumors) have expressed their frustration and have gone as far as to switch to Apple Music over the dilemma. The forum post spans over 100 pages and has over 4,000 votes so clearly the demand is there. But at the time of writing, Spotify hasn’t officially announced anything beyond, “Your suggestion has gathered the votes necessary and your feedback is now reaching the internal teams at Spotify.” However, Spotify not implementing Apple-specific features isn’t all that surprising. It took the company several years to implement a proper Apple Watch app. And that was at least a few years after Apple announced proper support for streaming audio for third-party apps. The same goes for AirPlay 2, the company waited a few years after the official AirPlay 2 announcement before committing to implementing the feature.
What Are Your Options?
Outside of Apple-specific features, Spotify announced earlier this year that it would bring lossless streaming to the service by the end of the year. At the time of writing, Spotify has less than two months before the end of the year hits. The company hasn’t properly announced pricing details or if it plans on supporting bitrates above CD quality.
For now, frustrated Spotify users have a few options when it comes to streaming services. The obvious one would be to go to Apple Music. Apple offers a free three-month trial and doesn’t charge extra for Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless, or Spatial Audio via Dolby Atmos. Another option would be to switch to Deezer or Amazon Music. Both services offer at least Lossless streaming, and support for spatial audio as well, in addition to native support on HomePod. If you want to stick with Spotify but want to play music on HomePod, you’ll have to wait a while as Spotify hasn’t officially announced any plans yet.
Source: MacRumors, Spotify Community Forum
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