Spotify on HomePod? Don’t hold your breath. It’s been almost three years since Apple opened the door to third-party music services on its HomePod speakers, but Spotify shows no signs of joining the party.
Spotify seems only slightly more enthusiastic about supporting AirPlay 2, with the streaming giant telling Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that it’s still “committed” to the feature while declining to reveal a timeline.
The comments from Spotify come a couple months prior to Apple’s scheduled Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The arrival of that event will mark three years since Apple opened up the HomePod to third-party streaming services.
So far, only Pandora, Deezer, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio offer native support on the HomePod. Amazon and YouTube Music are two of the larger music services waiting on the sidelines as far as HomePod support goes, but Spotify is the biggest HomePod holdout.
Asked by Gurman about its stance on native HomePod support, Spotify said that it hadn’t received a “significant volume” of feedback about the missing feature.
But as Gurman points out, there are a number of lengthy support threads on the Spotify community forum requesting native HomePod support, with one thread nearing 6,000 likes.
Gurman also calls out Spotify for dragging its feet on supporting HomePod when Spotify CEO Daniel Ek routinely firing broadsides at Apple for its “anticompetitive practices.”
Meanwhile, Spotify told German that it “remains committed to supporting AirPlay 2 at some point in the future,” but “we cannot state when that will be at this time.”
Spotify has had a stop/start relationship with AirPlay 2 over the years, at one point saying that it had ceased development on the feature before quickly backpedaling.
It’s possible to use the iPhone’s OS-level AirPlay functionality to stream Spotify tunes to a HomePod or an AirPlay 2-enabled speaker, but doing so means using the older AirPlay 1 protocol, which lacks multi-room audio and lossless support (not that Spotify offers lossless streaming, but still).
AirPlay 1 also incorporates a two second buffering delay, which plays havoc with playback controls as well as live lyrics.
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he covers smart speakers, soundbars, and other smart and home-theater devices. You can follow Ben on Twitter.