Music experience on your iPhone is about to change in a big way
Apple was famous for successfully keeping its hardware and software applications within its own ecosystem for years and even though it didn’t sit well with many, this didn’t stop them from becoming the biggest company in the world simply by keeping prices high and gadgets premium. That began to change as they came up with more services that could be sold to users outside its environment. For example, by restricting a service like Apple Music to iPhones, iPads and Macs, they may be losing big time from billions of Android users who could have been paying customers and so it only made business sense to open up services to rake in more revenue and true to it, they made a whopping $111b in the last quarter along with Amazon.
But even with the cross platform launch of Apple Music, whenever you ask Siri to play music on your iPhone, it goes straight to Apple Music even though you may have active Spotify or YouTube Music accounts on the same phone. But this is about to change with the upcoming iOS 14.5 update.
Before this update, for you get Siri to play you music on Spotify or even YouTube Music, you have to say “Hey Siri, play Bad on Spotify.” But with the new update, if you say “Hey Siri, play Bad by Michael Jackson”, it would now ask you for the first time what your default music app on your Apple gadget is and wouldn’t ask you the second time once set.
As little as this update may sound, it is a win for the likes of Spotify who have accused Apple of favouring their application over other apps on the iPhone in the past. This update may also calm some anti-competition and antitrust watchers. One of the accusations levelled against Google in the past in the EU was that they “unfairly” diminished other apps in Android to favour their own pre-installed apps like Gmail, YouTube, Drive and Photos among others.
This feature is available in iOS 14.5 developer and public beta versions that rolled out last week. Some of the reviews so far on this new Siri feature is that Apple should extend it to the Homepod as well.
Since this was released in public beta on February 1, you can expect it to start seeing requests for a general update from probably end of the month or sometime in March.