Bluetooth Audio Sharing

Apple briefly mentioned Audio Sharing with AirPods during yesterday’s keynote, but failed to elaborate on what that meant, exactly. The image shown suggested that it was based on sharing an audio stream between two phones simultaneously, but there were also hints of the Dual Bluetooth Support that we recently heard could be coming to the 2019 iPhone — a feature that would allow audio to be streamed from a single iPhone to multiple AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones.

However, it’s important to note that Dual Bluetooth is a Bluetooth 5.0 feature, and therefore shouldn’t require any new hardware that isn’t already in every iPhone model released since 2017. Apple’s list of other iOS 13 features shown at the end of the presentation offered one possible clue to this, with the simple line “Bluetooth wireless splitter,” suggesting that iOS 13 will indeed enable this feature on recent iPhone models as well.