Apple clarifies iOS default music app feature, and it’s not what people thought

Enlarge / Siri in iOS 14. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Over the past few weeks, there have been several reports (including one of our own) on a feature found in recent beta releases of iOS 14.5 that appeared to allow users to change the default music app on their iPhones. However, Apple just clarified to TechCrunch that the feature is not as it first seemed.

In the initial reports, users claimed that they were prompted to select a preferred music app, such as Spotify or Apple Music, when they asked Siri to play a song. They then found that Siri seemed to honor that choice on future requests.

Further, those users noticed that the usual command of "Hey Siri, play [song name] on Spotify" would cause Siri to use Spotify again in the future when they spoke the same request sans the "on Spotify" part. (In the current public version of iOS, users must say "on Spotify" every single time to play songs in that app instead of Apple Music.)

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