Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?

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.

Since no one has actually attempted to answer your question yet I'll give my guess as to why: I think Apple generally invested way too little time and developer talent into the development of Apple Music. I think this is evident in many ways when you look at the Music apps, _especially_ the macOS one. Since the initial release of Apple Music very little has happened to the apps, leading me to the conclusion that they're not spending time to improve them either.

Recall that Apple bought Beats to acquire the music streaming platform that Beats was developing with the purpose of turning it into Apple Music. To me this always seemed like a bit of a weird move since Apple could obviously build their own music streaming service without acquiring a company to do so. My guess is that someone at Apple who's more of a business person than a product person wanted Apple to have a Spotify competitor ASAP and saw the acquisition of Beats as a quick way to get there (with means that a business person can carry out: acquisitions). The acquisition happened, Beat's tech was turned into Apple Music (probably with time to market as the key metric that management cared about), Apple Music was released. Then the business person was happy, called it a day, and moved on.

Had Apple put their own focus and top talent into Apple Music the way they did with iTunes and iTunes Store back when iPod was their main cash cow, then I think Apple Music would have been very different. But alas, "music streaming" is probably just a check mark in someones list of services that Apple should have, and it's already checked so the job is done :)

I have the same question about YouTube Music—it's actually at the point now where YouTube proper does handoff better then the music app does, but Spotify is still way ahead of any other company in this area, including seamless handoff and using your laptop/phone as a remote control for a desktop or a different phone. I think most people just don't have multiple devices tbh, so companies don't see it as worth it to invest in multiple device coordination features. I wonder what the Spotify usage stats are.

If you have not already, you can ask for it: https://www.apple.com/feedback/apple-music.html

It seems other people have asked for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/qeb883/continui...

They sort of do have it. You can be playing music on your phone and "tap it" onto a HomePod. It also works the other way, I can ask Siri on the HomePod to play something, and the details will show on my iPhone & iPad. I don't know if there is a way to go from iPhone to computer.

   EDIT:

That may not qualify as a "handoff" though.

But it does handoff from current device to AirPods when you put them in, so there's that.

It's not even just continuity between devices that it lacks, most times when I plug my iPhone into my car's USB port, it always starts playing the library at track 0 (alphabetically). Normally I could avoid this if I open the Music app before plugging it in, but it would not always work.

So one of my favourite things about Spotify is that this doesn't happen.

However, unless I have the Music app still installed on the iPhone, the car's entertainment system doesn't show what's playing with Spotify and most times when I plug it in it plays from the Music app instead of Spotify and I have to switch apps. So I installed the Music app again and sync'd a single "silent" track with an exclamation icon album art and a track title saying "Switch Apps".

It's really annoying that when I had to buy a new car in 2019 after my old one was written off, that Apple CarPlay wasn't available in Hondas in South Africa except in Civics and CRVs or better, even though in other countries it was. I'd been holding off buying a new car until CarPlay was available and been telling the sales reps as much each time I'd look while dropping my car off for a service.

I think it is for the following reason: They don't have a concept yet. Spotify Continuity, or however it is called, is wonderful for 3 devices and less. But add more devices and it will get frustrating. What if I want to listen to multiple song on different devices (family setups)? Spotify makes it awful, actually this is one of the main reason I left Spotify. Whenever I left the living room and wanted to play my music on my Mac, the lining room would stop and the people in the living room had to start the music from one of their accounts. This is awful and annoying. Sure, as a single, this wouldn't bother. But most people are not single. So, I think it is due to a missing concept. The HomePod transfer feature was supposed to close the gab a little, but this needs more work. So maybe in the future a switch stream to device button will come, but until then, I will ask Siri to do it for me, Siri transfer to [room name]. Just wish this would work on my iPhone, iPad and Mac as well.

I feel like at this point adding more continuity features would just be drawing attention to the fact they rarely work correctly and are poorly/confusingly implemented in a variety of ways. Maybe I have exceptionally bad results and they work fine for everyone else but my general sense is Apple quiet quits features they know are a dumpster fire.

Apple isn't even able or willing to sync notification status on their apps between my iOS devices.

You get a few mails? All lockscreens will show the popups until i manually remove them from every single device, ridiculous.

>Is there any technical/legal limit for Apple to avoid doing this?

There isn't, they just don't have to try that hard, because of the myriad of other reasons people continue to pay Apple.

Is iTunes completely dead now? I remember when that switched, I had a ton of music but made the early investment to never touch the new Music app because the icon color sucked. I'm guessing internally a project called "Music" attracts little talent and apple considers it a good place for new employees to grow, yielding mediocre results. To this day I use Vox for music I care about and SiriusXM in the car (avoiding the phone entirely) for music I don't care about.

That's funny, because the video for Apple's new HomePod (announced yesterday) includes a very specific handoff example: https://youtu.be/oMf_i1YBuMk?t=74

(I don't use Apple Music or a HomePod, so no idea if this is new)

I don’t think spotify does this particularly well.. I moved over last month and this isn’t the main feature I am missing.

The feature I miss most is the weekly playlist followed closely by the multiple daily’s.

Should be a setting - some people might have a playlist for driving and one for working

The Apple Music app is terrible, one of the worst on the market. I hate it, it is so clunky and borderline unusable.