It appears Apple could soon allow iPhone and iPad users to set another app besides Apple Music as their device’s default music player when accessed via Siri.
In the latest iOS 14.5 beta, if you request Siri to play music after the update, the digital assistant asks what app you’d like to use if you have more than one music player on your device. If you don’t have the Apple Music app downloaded, then you may get to skip this step, according to 9to5Mac’s report.
However, some users are reporting the feature can be a bit buggy. That said, it’s running on beta software, so hopefully, Apple fixes these problems by the time it rolls to all users.
It should be noted that people running the beta haven’t been able to find an actual software toggle to enable this feature. This may suggest that the feature could actually come in a later iOS build after 14.5.
Either way, this makes it a lot easier to request music from Siri. I’m also no longer going to need to ask for every song twice when I’m using CarPlay since I always forget to say “On Spotify” after my commands.
To make it clear, with a third-party app on iOS 14.4, users currently need to say commands like “Hey Siri, play Blinding lights on Spotify.” After the update comes into effect, you can simply say, “Hey Siri, Play Blinding lights,” and your device should play music from your platform of choice.
Users have been waiting for Apple to allow the default music app to be changed since it first added the feature to email and web browsers when iOS 14 launched.