If you’ve had a look at the release notes for iOS 17.2, you may have noticed something missing. (The release candidate is available now, with a full release coming next week.)
Collaborative playlists in Apple Music, wherein you can share a playlist with others and add, remove, and reorder it all together, are not there. It was there in earlier beta releases but was removed in the fourth beta.
Apple Music does get two new features in this release: You can disable music history when in certain Focus modes (so your hours of LoFi study music don’t mess up your recommendations, for instance) and there’s a new Favorites playlist that includes all the songs you’ve ever marked as a Favorite.
Nobody really knows why the collaborative playlist feature was pulled, but 9to5Mac suspects that it has to do with abuse and spam—they’ve seen newer code with things like limits on the number of pending requests a user can have. It seems that Apple didn’t engineer enough safeguards for popular users being bombarded with playlist requests or bad actors using scripts to overwhelm others with playlist edits.
With the iOS 17.2 release notes all but written in stone now, and iOS 17.3 not due for release until January, it looks like the collaborative playlist feature isn’t going to be available in time for you to work on your epic holiday playlist with your besties.