On the other hand, however, if you’ve just installed Tidal or YouTube Music on your iPhone, Siri may recognize that and prompt you the next time you make a request, just to make sure that you really still want to use Spotify. If Siri’s intelligence works correctly, this could have the same result for those who always use the same music service - after all, if you keep telling Siri to use Spotify, and that’s the only music app you ever open, it’s a safe bet that Siri isn’t going to randomly ask you someday if you’d rather use Apple Music. Instead, Apple says that the feature is going to attempt to use machine learning and AI to try and pick the best music service to use based on each users’ own listening habits. In speaking with TechCrunch, Apple has made it apparent that this feature is not going to be about “actually allowing users to select a new default music service,” quelling earlier reports to this effect. In a somewhat rare move for a feature that’s still in beta, Apple has also offered up some clarification to help manage users’ expectations for when iOS 14.5 finally gets released. In other words, it looks like Siri is going to try and decide which music app to open on a case-by-case basis, and while this falls short of being able to set a default “go to” music for every request, it’s definitely a big step away from simply assuming that everyone wants to use Apple Music. Which one do you want to use to listen to this?” While requesting a song in the first iOS 14.5 beta had Siri responded simply with “Which app would you like to use?” doing the same in the latest beta now has Siri explaining, “I’m learning to choose the right audio apps for you.

Instead, it looks like Siri is going to try and be smart about it. The feature actually vanished entirely in the next beta before resurfacing this week in beta 3, with Siri sharing a new explanation that makes it clear that this isn’t really about setting a “default” music player.

Change default music player