When I first bought the HomePod, people in my family were able to listen to music uninterrupted. But now if I listen to music on my iPhone it stops playing music on the HomePod and vice versa. This is a really lousy user experience. So the solution to this is to pay an extra $5 a month for a family plan? I’m the only one in the family that uses Apple Music outside of the HomePod, it seems outrageous to me that they switch up the way this works after I bought the HomePod.
Out of curiosity, do Spotify, Pandora, Google, Slacker, YouTube or Tidal permit multiple simultaneous streams on single accounts?
Here’s the relevant MacRumors article about the change. https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/14/homepod-device-streaming-limits/
I’ve always had an Apple Music family plan, so I wasn’t affected. Last I checked, Spotify would change the music in location 1 if you started playing in location 2.
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Pandora, at least, does not.
I wasn’t aware of any pay services that do, but I wasn’t sure; the music labels charge for individual stream access so I did expect that to be passed along to the consumer.
Apple Customer Care apparently claimed that it should not have been possible in the very first place for users to play music simultaneously from Apple Music on their iPhone and HomePod, and they shut it off … eventually. Not sure I entirely buy that the access was due to a bug, but whatever…
This was one thing I checked before buying the HomePod, I read reviews like this one which said:
That includes HomePod not counting against any Apple Music device or concurrent stream limit — set it up one or more HomePods with your iPhone or iPad, leave the house with that device, and anyone who stays or comes home can still listen to Apple Music on any or all the HomePods you’ve set up.
Of course this isn’t an official pronouncement from Apple, so they can now claim it wasn’t supposed to work that way, but they did nothing to discourage users from thinking this.
I like Rene Ritchie, but why does he always have to carry Apple’s water?
So, regardless of what any of us may have previously heard or experienced, this — single stream for single accounts — is the way HomePod and Apple Music were always meant to work together
Why is he never critical of Apple? He is just taking what they say at face value. Apple has a PR department, let them defend Apple. Ritchie should question decisions that are bad for the user.