Which makes this jailbreak somewhat moot, for now at least. It makes more sense to buy an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker rather than risk bricking your $300 Homepod that has no data port
I wonder if there would be a case for enforcing companies that use the word "speaker" in their products to allow customers to play whatever they want via bluetooth or jack input.
- AirPlay uses lossless compression to stream audio from source to speaker. All Bluetooth audio streaming uses lossy compression.
- AirPlay has the capability of playing across a much larger distance and with a solid connection between devices than Bluetooth.
- When using AirPlay you’re actually capable of controlling the volume of the Airplay speaker (not just the volume of the device which transfers to the Bluetooth device).
- Airplay can stream to multiple output devices. Bluetooth is one-to-one streaming.
- AirPlay caches multiple minutes of Audio (or Video). AFAIK Bluetooth does not cache.
A sibling comment talked about using a Sonos with Bluetooth, but having delay issues. There is no lag on AirPlay:
Sonos also supports AirPlay, as well as DLNA/UPnP rendering. So for example you can set a Sonos speaker as the output device, wirelessly, in the latest nightly builds of VLC[1].
So, what's the use case for Bluetooth here? Streaming from phone to HomePod via AirPlay is so superior to Bluetooth as to make it obsolete for such needs.
The only thing I can think of is if the kids in the house have Androids or something. Or do some game consoles stream to Bluetooth speakers?