One of the music-related antitrust complaints about Apple concerns how open (or not) its Siri voice-assistant is to streaming services that aren’t Apple Music. “Apple won’t allow us to be on HomePod and they definitely won’t let us connect with Siri to play your jams,” claimed the website Spotify set up to support its European complaint against Apple earlier this year, for example. Actually, it seems like soon, Apple WILL let Siri play people’s jams from other streaming services.
“Apple is opening up its SiriKit framework to third-party music, podcasts, audiobooks, and radio apps in iOS 13 and iPadOS, enabling users to use Siri to control audio playback in supported apps,” reports MacRumors, based on information released during Apple’s WWDC developer event. iOS 13 (including the new iPadOS software for Apple’s tablets) will be released later this year.
The devil will be in the detail here: not just how much of Siri’s features are opened up to other music services, but also how well those other services use the framework. While it awaits news on its desired EC investigation of Apple’s policies, Spotify will surely also be getting its developers on the case with SiriKit.
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