Apple’s SharePlay is expanding to include speakers in your home. Soon, the HomePod, HomePod Mini, Apple TV, and any Bluetooth speaker will work with SharePlay and Apple Music, meaning you can share control of the music in your home with friends and family. Apple’s music service is also getting Music Haptics to allow those with hearing difficulties to experience music on iPhone. Both new features were announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this week and should arrive with the tvOS and iOS updates this fall.
Similar to the way SharePlay works in Apple CarPlay, this new SharePlay ability will let you give other people access to what’s playing on the speakers in your home. It’s the same concept as Spotify Jams, which lets multiple people contribute to and control a Spotify playlist.
While the person launching the SharePlay session will need to have an Apple Music subscription, the people joining won’t. They’ll just need to bring their iPhone next to the iPhone of the subscriber or scan a QR code in the Apple Music SharePlay window. Once approved, they can then control what’s playing on the HomePod, Apple TV, or Bluetooth speaker and add tracks to the playlist through the Apple Music app.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Apple first planned to bring SharePlay to HomePods with the iOS 17.4 Beta, but the feature was removed before the full release.
SharePlay first launched for iPhones in iOS 15 as a service that let you stream music, online videos, and movies with friends over FaceTime. The CarPlay implementation followed in iOS 17, and now with iOS 18, you will finally be able to share that DJ control with friends in your home.
A new Music Haptics feature for Apple Music uses the iPhone’s Taptic Engine to “play taps, textures, and refined vibrations to the audio of the music,” giving users with hearing difficulties a different way to sense the sound.
Apple says Music Haptics will work across millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog and will also be available as an API so developers can add the feature to their apps. It is scheduled to arrive this fall with iOS 18.
