Developers claim to have cracked the proprietary AirPlay 2 protocol

Apple’s proprietary AirPlay 2 device-to-device media streaming protocol has apparently been reverse-engineered. As per the developers behind the effort, this has created an opportunity for owners of speakers that have not licensed the technology from Apple to receive and decode the audio with advanced AirPlay 2 features such as multi-room support.

9to5Mac reports that the original announcement has been posted to GitHub.

“The code I have is rather a Python prototype for debugging/reversing not meant for running in production,” according to the developers. With AirPlay 2 cracked, all we now need is an app taking advantage of the reverse-engineered protocol.

9to5Mac has more:

What this means is that multi-room playback from iOS devices will be possible to any speaker system when connected to something like a Raspberry Pi running an app designed to receive and decode AirPlay 2 audio streams.

The original AirPlay protocol was also cracked a few years ago. Thanks to enthusiasts who have built Raspberry Pi-based AirPlay receivers with nothing more than a few commands in Terminal, apps like Shairport-sync let you send music from iTunes to non-supported speakers.

AirPlay lets you sling media like photos, music and video from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or Apple Watch to your big screen TV via the Apple TV set-top box. AirPlay also supports screen-mirroring and is built natively into compatible Hi-Fi receivers and Smart TV sets.

Apple has the full list of AirPlay 2 speakers and receivers on its website.