Three developers have seemingly managed to reverse engineer Apple’s AirPlay 2 protocol paving the way for iPhones and iPads to stream music to almost any wireless speaker which is connected to a Raspberry Pi.

AirPlay 2 is Apple’s proprietary protocol which it licenses out to partners for use in speakers and multi-speaker system. Without Apple’s license, OEMs cannot launch speakers with AirPlay 2 support. It is only with this license that AirPlay 2-compatible speakers are able to receive and decode the stream from an iPhone, iPad, or other Apple devices.

Three developers have managed to reverse engineer this stream and got AirPlay 2 to work on non-AirPlay speakers. And this includes multi-room audio as well which is one of the highlights of AirPlay 2.

This does not mean that you will be able to magically stream audio using AirPlay 2 from your iPhone to any non-AirPlay compatible speaker system though. You will need to connect a Raspberry Pi or a similar device to it and run an app that will be able to decode the AirPlay 2 stream. There might also be a few lingering issues including a possible increase in latency.

The developers do note that a lot of work is still left to be done despite cracking the protocol. The current code is extremely rough and they also need to work on an app that can receive and decode the stream, though this should only be a matter of time.

AirPlay 1 was also Apple’s proprietary streaming format which was eventually reverse-engineered and there are a number of apps that let users send their AirPlay stream to incompatible devices.