Apple is finally getting into the smart home speaker market with its long-awaited Siri speaker called HomePod. Unveiled at WWDC 2017, the Apple smart speaker will be competing with the likes of the Amazon Echo and Google Home. It’s a voice assistant-equipped speaker that will help with everyday tasks – respond to voice commands and play music, set alarms, control smart devices and search for information online.
And obviously, just like its rivals, software updates will be pushed to Apple’s smart speaker in order to keep everything up to date. But how exactly will software updates be delivered to the HomePod?
Unlike the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated Watch app to receive software updates, the HomePod will get delivered its software updates over-the-air (OTA) via the Home App on iPhone.
“Software updates for HomePod will be managed through the Home app. The app will alert users when a new software update is available and will show an interface similar to the one used for iOS updates. Users will have the option to enable automatic updates, although it’s unclear how those will be managed,” 9to5Mac noted.
As such, HomePod runs a special version of iOS and handles itself to how an iOS device would, without a display. That means HomePod updates will fall right alongside future iOS updates as well. The latest software publicly available for it is iOS 11.2.5, which will likely be the version installed on HomePods.
9to5Mac is also stated that HomePod will have certain requirements too if you want everything to be up to date. “HomePod will likely be updated in the same way watchOS updates do via the Apple Watch app on the iPhone, and will likely have the same update requirements (e.g. HomePod version 11.3 can’t be installed if iPhone is still on iOS 11.2.5).”
HomePod orders began last week on 26 January 2018 ahead of the speaker’s official launch on February 9.
