Huh? They already support LOTS of stuff I don’t have. There are hundreds of thousands of Airplay devices, so THAT argument is ridiculous.
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That’s not the same as having a feature purely locked down to one operating system which airplay 2 is. All other protocols in Roon work on all operating systems. .Airplay 2 can only be sent from a Mac server or an iOS clients therefore those users that don’t run core or remotes on Apple hardware cannot in any way send music via Airplay 2. So the large amount of users who use a Nucleus or Rock or Linux or Windows cannot play via Airplay 2. Until Airplay 2 is available to run from any platform which from a server level looks unlikely then I doubt it will happen.
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Your point is well-made. However, we should also consider that though Apple’s protocol may be proprietary, the number of devices using it is certainly worth noting. Another data point is the fair number Roon users [including me] that have been asking for it, Apple’s jump into high quality audio in 2021, and when this post began [2018].
So, we can talk about how closed apple is, walled garden, the apple cult, so on and on, but I think this should not be ignored. Apple is not going away, Apple Music is going to continue to eat Spotify and others’ business. I subscribe to Qobuz because of Roon, and Apple for convenience and larger catalog.
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Yes, Apple has a huge ecosystem, millions of users around the world, and a great market share in the streaming business. However, AirPlay, as a media “casting” technology does not strike me as compatible with Roon, either philosophically, or technologically. I think a better option would be to integrate Apple Music into Roon, alongside Tidal and Qobuz. Somehow, I don’t think Apple would be likely to to agree to that. Having said that, I think it would be neat if Apple was integrated in Roon, esp. with the new spatial audio format. Roon would have a chance to implement it really well, perhaps even better than Apple. It could entice a lot of listeners to augment/change their setups to accommodate lossless multichannel audio.
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It takes two to tango, and in this case, I suspect neither wants the other as a partner.
Now that Roon 2.0 makes use of the native macOS support of the NET framework, I’m hoping that this will allow them to easily access macOS’s official libraries for sending to AirPlay 2 devices (when the core runs on macOS). Keeping fingers crossed.
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apologies for posting in this idle thread, but thought i’d share some relevant info (and also ask for feedback from the many experienced users here) …
i monitored network traffic while using recent versions of MacOS and shairport-sync as Airplay 2 receivers (in combination with various streaming apps), and i found that end-to-end (app/sender/receiver) Airplay 2 setups are always limited to lossy AAC 256 kbps … this is not just with Apple Music (as i’ve seen reported/implied elsewhere)
please see linked summary … i tried and observed network traffic for all listed app/sender/receiver combinations (except for those in grey text followed by “?”, these are assumptions or based on old observations)
even if it was possible for Roon to act as an Airplay 2 sender, the potential benefits would be offset (at least to some extent) by the lossy transcode
anyway, the addition of Airplay 2 receiver capability to general purpose computers (MacOS Monterey or later, Raspberry Pi’s running shairport-sync, etc.) makes it easier for folks to observe and verify for themselves … please share your feedback in case i’m missing something important in either measurement or interpretation 
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