Why my iPhone and iPad show the same thing

When more than one of your devices is controlling the same renderer, Serento keeps the queue, playback state and volume in step between them. Start on the iPhone, pick up on the Mac, and the second device shows what is actually playing rather than its own stale idea of it.

This works across different iCloud accounts on the same network, so a household sharing one streaming system sees one consistent now-playing.

It is tied to the renderer, not to your account: two devices pointed at two different streamers each keep their own queue and do not interfere.

If a device shows an empty player, it has not adopted a session yet. That happens when nothing is playing, or when the last library it was using has been deselected.