How to Turn On Sound Glow on HomePod

It’s not very often that older devices get updates that bring them new features, especially devices that have been out for many years now. But with iOS 27.2, which has just come out, your HomePod minis and your second-generation full-size HomePods have just gained a really cool new feature called Sound Glow. I’ll show you how it works.

And before we get started, if you’re new around here, then hi, I’m Jacob, and I make hundreds of friendly and easy-to-follow tech tutorials just like this one. So, if you want more things to help you make the most of your devices, please do press subscribe now, and then you’ll get more videos in your feed.

Okay, in this video I’m going to show you two different things. Thing number one is how to check that your HomePod is able to use Sound Glow, by making sure it’s fully up to date. And then thing number two is how to actually use Sound Glow, what it does and what it looks like.

So, let’s get started. I’m going to open the Home app on the iPhone, and I’ll press the Options button in the top corner. From here, we’re going on to Home Settings.

Now, on this screen, you’re looking for the software update, which is probably not somewhere you go very often, and you don’t really need to, but it’s going to show you if your devices are up to date or not. If you get a message like mine that says all devices are up to date, then you’re good to go. But if not, you can tap on your HomePod here and it will install the newest software on there for you. It takes maybe ten minutes. It’s not too bad. So, grab a coffee and then come back.

Okay, so now we’re fully up to date. Let’s turn on Sound Glow. To do this, we’re back to the main screen of the Home app. Confusing, I know. And we’re going to press on the HomePod symbol on your home page. If you’ve got multiple HomePods, do it on each one.

Then, from the main playing screen, you can press Settings in the corner, and there’ll be a new toggle called Sound Glow. If you turn this on, it’s now activated on your device.

And so, you’re probably thinking, well, what is Sound Glow? I’m glad you asked, or didn’t ask. I can’t hear you. Sound Glow will change the lights on top of the HomePod from being the weird white glow that’s always there to actually lighting up in time to the music, and in the colours of the album artwork of whatever song you’re playing.

It creates a kind of mini disco vibe on the HomePods. In a dark room, it looks really cool. And hopefully, whilst I’ve been talking, you’ve been able to see on screen what that looks like, because it’s much easier to see than it is to describe.

So, that’s it for this QuickTip, but I think you’re probably going to really enjoy this one next.