Google Denies Apple Music Coming to Google Home

Google has denied recent rumours that Apple Music may be coming to its Google Home devices, following a reference to Apple Music found in its Home iOS app earlier this week. That discovery led to logical speculation that the streaming music service could be expanding into Google’s Home ecosystem, but the company has responded saying that it was simply a software bug.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a Google spokesperson stopped short of ruling out the possibility of Apple Music someday appearing on its devices, simply blaming the appearance of it on a bug, and saying, “We have nothing to announce regarding updates to Google Home.”

Of course, it seems unlikely that such a specific reference to Apple Music would appear within one of Google’s apps unless developers were at least testing this kind of integration, and there are certainly enough precedents that would suggest such a deal cold be in the works.

Firstly, Apple has already shown an eagerness to expand its Apple Music service beyond its own hardware ecosystem. The company released an Android Apple Music app beta only months after the service debuted, and has kept the Android app on par with its built-in iOS counterpart, even going so far as to add support for Android Auto — a direct competitor with Apple’s own CarPlay feature.

Last fall, Apple also rolled out Apple Music to Amazon’s Echo devices, an expansion that ceded one of Apple’s HomePod-exclusive features to a competing smart speaker.

Google is also no stranger to Apple Music support. The service can already be controlled by the Google Assistant on both iOS and Android devices, and Google has also introduced Apple Music controls into its popular Google Maps app, allowing users to see what’s playing and access track controls directly from the app’s navigation screen.

In fact, it’s this type of integration that Google is offering up as the explanation for why the Apple Music reference appeared in its Home app. According to a Google spokesperson, the Google Assistant and Google Home apps share a common code base for music service, and the Apple Music controls appeared in the Home speaker app due to a software glitch on the development side.

Still, it seems likely that Apple would welcome the opportunity to expand its Music service onto Google Home speakers, and for its part Google doesn’t have much reason to resist. Although Google offers its own Play Music and YouTube Music services, the company also already supports Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer.

In addition to its music subscription service, Apple has been rapidly working to expand its own service offerings outside of its own hardware, with the announcement of new AirPlay 2 capable TVs and Samsung smart TVs gaining the ability to stream movies and TV shows directly from users’ iTunes cloud libraries. With Apple’s video streaming service expected to launch this year, the company seems eager to make sure as many eyeballs will be able to see it as possible, even if they don’t already own an Apple device.