Three ways in

The Halo has three inputs, and the difference between them isn't quality. It's where the music actually comes from.

Bluetooth is the fastest way in: open your phone, pick the Halo, play. But your phone stays the source. Someone calls and the ringtone comes out of the speaker. Walk to the shed and the music follows you.

The minijack is the simplest thing in the box. A cable, a signal, nothing to go wrong. The trade is physical — whatever is making the sound has to stay next to the speaker.

WiFi is different in kind. Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, TuneIn — those don't run on your phone and get relayed. They run on the Halo. Your phone opens the app, points at the speaker, and steps back.

Which means you can put your phone in your pocket and leave, and the music keeps playing in the living room. Someone calls and nothing happens to the sound. The phone was never carrying anything.

(AirPlay is the exception: Apple routes the audio through your iPhone, so the same limits apply as with Bluetooth. It's there because people expect it.)

For most people, WiFi becomes the way they use the Halo without ever deciding to. It's the one that stops feeling like operating a device.

About the app

We built one, and then we made it do less.

The temptation with a connected speaker is to build a music app: browse, search, playlists, recommendations, all of it inside your own interface. We didn't. Spotify has spent fifteen years making Spotify. We're not going to make a better version of it in a corner of our own app, and you don't want us to try.

So the George Vanadium app does three things. Volume. Input. Multiroom. For everything else you use the app you already use — open Spotify, pick the Halo, done.

The honest cost of that choice: over WiFi, volume lives in our app rather than in Spotify's. That's one tap more than it should be, and we know it. So we built a widget you can put on your home screen or your lock screen, and the volume is there without opening anything.

The best app for a speaker is the one you rarely open. That's what we were aiming for. Not a smaller app — a shorter path back to not thinking about it.