I wonder if this will open the door to using Roon as an Airplay device.
This may turn out to be little more than a rebranding of this existing functionality, rather than anything new. But here’s hoping.
Ideally you wouldn’t need any external hardware and Roon could / would act natively as an Airplay endpoint itself within the core feature set / software.
But my guess is that Apple are funny about (end-user) software (as opposed to hardware) being certified as Airplay ‘devices’ and Roon are uneasy with implementing 3rd party Airplay libraries like shairport-sync or similar in Roon.
The downside is all the existing workarounds involve annoying delays or are too unstable for everyday use. I expect like many I just want a solution that works when I want to play some music, I don’t want to maintain a tech stack with external devices and additional software updates even if I technically can.