I’m going to be glued to this thread because I desperately want this. If you ask me, a lack of features like this is the #1 failure of the Apple ecosystem. I’d even go so far as to call it a kind of big, indirect lie. Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest? For years I feel like I was told as long as I carefully and meticulously shelled out the dough to make every device I can Apple branded I’d experience a kind of integrated device nirvana and it has proved to be almost entirely false. The killer feature that sold me on beginning to invest in the first place was the astounding seamlessness of messages across macOS and iOS. Yet I’ve seen little progress beyond this. It’s embarrassing.
I should be able to control and start playing music on my Apple watch on any Apple device from any Apple device, whether that be a HomePod (mini), iPhone, or Apple TV. Yet this isn’t possible. Bluetooth used to be just as, if not more, seamless, and it was more performant. I can’t believe I’m saying that.
Even the error messages are comical. Attempts to do this in certain scenarios will overtly claim multiple people are trying to play music and attempt to coerce me to upgrade my plan so that multiple people can play music on multiple devices at the same time. I’m single and live alone. I just want to easily play music everywhere in my apartment, easily transfer music from my TV to my bathroom speaker without losing my place in the playlist or podcast, or change what’s playing using my Apple Watch because I decided that I’d like to hear something different emanating from the other room without getting up to find my phone.
I’ll cut this short before it becomes a screed, but I’ll close with this. I just asked Siri to play music on one of my HomePod Minis to verify my claim about being unable to control devices by saying the simple phrase, “Hey Siri, play music.” And the response I got was, “Sorry, [name]. Something went wrong and I couldn’t resume.” So I said, “Hey Siri, play music from Apple Music” and she immediately started playing “a station I might like”. This whole system is broken.
>When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.
He wrote it in the context of Twitter/Facebook, but it fits for other 'closed' ecosystems like the Apple ecosystem.
Enshittification is a great term. Great piece by Cory too. I wrote something similar about 'UX Erosion' a few years ago about the same dynamic on social apps:
>UX Erosion, n; 1. shiny new service & concept appears with great UX that attracts creators, followed by a slow undermining of that UX, transitioning from delight-oriented to lock-in, habit, and apathy.
And it seems to be decomposing in front of us. I asked my Amazon device to play the Beatles from Spotify. The response was “I could not find a band called the Beatles”.
Of course, when I dropped the “from Spotify”, there was an app that only played the Beatles. With ads.
>Why own a ton of Apple devices if you can’t seamlessly and easily control things on whatever Apple device is nearest?
Because owning a ton of Apple devices lets you show off to other people how cool you are, and earns Apple a ton of money. Why should they bother fixing this stuff when Apple users will buy all-Apple devices no matter how badly they work together?
I haven't tried it for myself, but many comments here say that Spotify works far better, across many different devices and even with 3rd-party client software.
Sonos and Spotify both do more to make this possible than Apple is doing. I don't have to leave Apple to take advantage of these, but I don't have to stay or continue to buy their devices either. Overall, my confidence in the brand is just greatly reduced enough to seek out and evaluate alternatives next time I go looking for a device solution when previously my faith was high enough to not look beyond Apple. Heck, I could hack something together myself and get something more integrated.
You can look at it as others catching up or Apple slowing down, but the bottom line is that Apple isn't ahead of the pack anymore on this. I think they've focused so much on supply chain logistics and hardware that they've completely lost sight of the core day-to-day software user experience that originally created that die-hard Apple loyalty.
i opened the music app on my watch, clicked the airplay icon, and i see all of my home devices (homepod, apple tvs) listed. even my mac mini is listed.
AirPlay is different from the desired functionality. It basically uses your mac as a remote speaker, instead of actually opening the music app on the computer and playing music there.
You can test this out quite easily: play any audio from your mac (YouTube, Apple Music, whatever) and then try to pause it on your watch. This is not possible.
Spotify Connect allows you to do this easily on the other hand.
Apple’s “home” app allows for a bit of that. You can control music on homepods/apple tv from any device. I don’t think you can control a Mac like a speaker, though. And I actually find it buggy as heck when trying to control a speaker from multiple devices - requests are constantly timing out, the UI doesn’t update properly with the current state, etc. In practice I always just use AirPlay and control it from a single device.
That is true for AirPlay, but AirPlay 2 works differently: It controls playback on a device (say, a HomePod) and all devices on the network see what is playing on that device and can control playback.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't. The only thing I see listed on my Apple Watch is my Airpods. I have an Apple Watch series 6 (cellular model), iPhone 14 Pro Max, three HomePod Minis, an Apple TV 4K, and an M1 MacBook Pro. All of these devices are listed under my Apple ID within macOS system settings, so I don't know what gives. I guess to Apple's credit, there are a lot of failure points that could exist beyond their control around WiFi connectivity. But the three devices I listed that can serve as Home Hubs should help alleviate this issue when, for example, my Apple Watch isn't connected to WiFi. Maybe I should dig into this more.
I should be able to control and start playing music on my Apple watch on any Apple device from any Apple device, whether that be a HomePod (mini), iPhone, or Apple TV. Yet this isn’t possible. Bluetooth used to be just as, if not more, seamless, and it was more performant. I can’t believe I’m saying that.
Even the error messages are comical. Attempts to do this in certain scenarios will overtly claim multiple people are trying to play music and attempt to coerce me to upgrade my plan so that multiple people can play music on multiple devices at the same time. I’m single and live alone. I just want to easily play music everywhere in my apartment, easily transfer music from my TV to my bathroom speaker without losing my place in the playlist or podcast, or change what’s playing using my Apple Watch because I decided that I’d like to hear something different emanating from the other room without getting up to find my phone.
I’ll cut this short before it becomes a screed, but I’ll close with this. I just asked Siri to play music on one of my HomePod Minis to verify my claim about being unable to control devices by saying the simple phrase, “Hey Siri, play music.” And the response I got was, “Sorry, [name]. Something went wrong and I couldn’t resume.” So I said, “Hey Siri, play music from Apple Music” and she immediately started playing “a station I might like”. This whole system is broken.