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

Apple boasts a lot about their handoff feature, but the one place where I need it most is when I play some music on my iPhone and want to later continue listening to it on my Mac. Spotify does a great job at that and that's been the main reason I haven't switched to Apple Music yet. Is there any technical/legal limit for Apple to avoid doing this?

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.

The feature to handoff to your homepod, at least on the classic homepods that I have, sucks. It's very slow and unreliable.

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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.