Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services is seemingly at it again, dropping internal company knowledge tidbits via Twitter. Eddy Cue, who last week replied to a number of tweets confirming that Apple Music could potentially be introduced in a new developer beta of iOS 9 has again used his verified Twitter account to answer iOS related queries from the public. This time around Cue has confirmed that Apple is working internally in an attempt to reintroduce the recently removed Home Sharing for music feature back into iOS 9.
Last week’s introduction of iOS 8.4 was an example of Apple giving with one hand and silently taking away with the other. The inclusion of Apple Music was undoubtedly something new for users to sink their teeth into, but iOS 8.4 also had an internal change that saw the longstanding Home Sharing for music feature removed without prior warning. Apple also silently updated the Home Sharing support page to reflect this change. In case you didn’t know, Home Sharing for music was a feature that allowed iOS devices to stream tunes across the same WiFi network from a machine running iTunes so, as you can imagine, its removal created a lot of disgruntled users.
We don’t know if Eddy Cue’s recent run of answering questions about Apple’s internal product roadmaps is officially sanctioned by the hierarchy, or even it will continue, but for now it’s great to be able to get answers to questions via an official source rather than having to speculate on things. Of course, the fact that his tweet reply states that Apple is “working” to have Home Sharing in iOS 9 is by no means a guarantee that the service will resume. It’s likely that it was removed in iOS 8.4 due to licensing issues with content providers in Apple Music, so actually negotiating the deal to allow this to be reintroduced could be problematic.
Apple Music is of course Cupertino’s streaming music service that was introduced as part of iOS 8.4. The introduction of iTunes 12.2 soon after the iOS 8.4 update also means that users can get to grips with and stream more than 30 million tracks via the desktop as well. Being able to set up iTunes on a home network and stream that music library to an iOS device is undoubtedly an attractive prospect, so let’s hope we see a reintroduction of Home Sharing for music sooner rather than later.
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