John Voorhees, writing for MacStories:

Apple first revealed that the HomePod would support third-party music streaming services at WWDC without any explanation of how that would work. However, with the release of Pandora’s update, we now know that the process involves a combination of the third-party app’s settings and Apple’s Home app.

Other third-party music services are sure to follow Pandora’s lead, so even if you’re not a Pandora user, it’s instructive to see how it has implemented HomePod integration.

I gave this a try yesterday afternoon and it works really well. I’ve never been an Apple Music subscriber, but have two HomePods throughout our house — and a HomePod Mini on the way. Instead, my wife and I use a combination of Pandora Plus and Plex through Prism.

Some of our music was purchased through iTunes so we can certainly use voice commands for some of our playback interactions on HomePod, but because all of our music isn’t available, more often than not we simply use AirPlay from our iPhones.

But the mental model of this new setup is much easier to grok. Being able to playback Pandora radio stations through voice commands on our HomePod and continuing to play specific songs and albums with AirPlay is quite nice.

➝ Source: macstories.net