I Love You Sonos, But it’s Time to Make Up With Google (Premium)

We recently learned that Sonos is planning to dramatically expand its product offerings next year. But it’s not enough: For Sonos to truly make sense in this heterogeneous world, it needs to make friends with its nemesis, Google. Otherwise, it could lose out to a growing field of competitors in the premium smart speaker market, many of which will offer the cross-platform integrations that Sonos currently does not.

This one is hard on me.

I am a long-time fan of Sonos and I have invested thousands of dollars in its incredible family of premium smart speakers. I defended the company during the faux outrage campaign that arose in the wake of its necessary decision to obsolete its older products, a problem that won’t occur again with its newer, future-proof and more easily serviced devices. And I raged against Google for stealing its technology after pretending to offer Sonos a partnership so it could get a peek at its secret sauce.

The problem, of course, is that I use Google products and services too. And while I, like any thinking person, can see the obvious injustice in a Big Tech firm with infinite money unfairly and illegally chipping away at their much smaller and less powerful competitors—think Epic v. Apple, or Epic v. Google, for that matter—I also have more pragmatic day-to-day concerns. And part of the appeal of Sonos and other companies like it, including those in other markets, is that it’s heterogeneous. That is, Sonos doesn’t exist to serve only Apple customers, just as it doesn’t exist to only serve Google customers. It not being tied to a particular ecosystem is one of the reasons I bet on Sonos.

But Sonos isn’t truly heterogeneous. Yes, the platform supports over 50 streaming services, and the company even brags that it is “building bridges, expanding [its] platform, forging new partnerships, and pushing the limits of what’s possible” on its “Our DNA” page. But that very page hints at the problem. Among the integrations listed there is Google Play Music, a service that hasn’t existed for over three years.

Ah boy, do I miss Google Play Music. Created in the years before Google destroyed its relationship with Sonos by stealing its intellectual property, Play Music could, among other things, control Sonos speakers. And that’s key because otherwise, you need to use the Sonos app. And the Sonos app is terrible. Especially if you want to not just play music but also manage music, a process that could be as simple as editing the playback order of songs in a playlist and as obvious as editing that playlist itself.

Today, several apps, including Spotify, can still control your Sonos speakers. And that’s important for users of those apps: Not only do they get to use the app they know and like, but they can take advantage of the features it has, like playlist management, that the Sonos app does not. (To be clear, I am referring here to playlists that are native to the service. Sonos does have its own playlists too. But since you can’t play those playlists from outside your home, it’s unclear why anyone would use this feature.)

Google Play Music could control my Sonos speakers. But YouTube Music, its successor, cannot. It’s not a technical limitation. It’s that Sonos and Google are involved in a high-profile legal battle over that stolen IP and Sonos, somewhat understandably, is only interested in doing the minimum when it comes to supporting Google services. Sonos can’t ignore YouTube Music, obviously: It’s tied to YouTube Premium and the biggest collection of music videos in the world. But it simply lets YouTube Music users access that service through the Sonos app. Which, again, is terrible.

And it’s not just YouTube Music: Google also created a proprietary communications protocol called Google Cast (formerly Chromecast) that, among other things, lets a user initiate and control an audio/video stream from an Android or Chrome OS device that’s played via smart speakers and other devices. Google Cast is very much like Apple AirPlay, and in the same way that AirPlay is integrated into Apple devices, Google Cast is integrated into Google devices. Sonos supports AirPlay (and, on compatible devices, Bluetooth). But Sonos does not support Google Cast. If it did, I could use YouTube Music on my Pixel to control my Sonos speakers, just as I use YouTube Music on my iPhone to control my Sonos speakers over AirPlay. It works amazingly well.

On some level, I understand where Sonos is coming from: It’s hard to partner with a company that stole from you. But on some other level, I feel like Sonos customers like me should matter more than that reality. And since roughly half of its customers use Android phones, perhaps Sonos should accommodate us while fighting the good fight. It apparently has enough resources to plan 10 product launches next year, according to Mark Gurman, far more than ever before, but it can’t integrate with Google Cast and YouTube Music? Really?

Here’s the problem. Sonos has competitors and it will soon have more of them. And those competitors, by and large, will not ignore major swathes of the market. That is, they will offer premium Wi-Fi smart speakers that work with both Airplay and Google Cast (and, where it makes sense, Bluetooth). And some of these companies are well-funded.

Consider JBL.

In July, I wrote about purchasing two JBL Charge 5 speakers for our apartment in Mexico. I had experienced an older version of these speakers at a friend’s restaurant, and we were blown away by their sound quality and volume, and thanks to some secret sauce of their own, they can be stereo-paired despite being Bluetooth-based. We had wanted to get Sonos speakers, of course, but electronics are very expensive in Mexico, and the JBLs were on sale.

JBL makes a variety of audio products and it’s owned by Harman, which is renowned for its own audio products and brands, including Harman Kardon. And Harman, wait for it, is owned by Samsung, Apple’s only real competitor in the smartphone space and, perhaps as important, a company with major ecosystem aims of its own. JBL doesn’t have infinite money, of course. But Samsung does. It’s just a matter of how it chooses to spend it.

What JBL does have, suddenly, is a new premium Wi-Fi smart speaker brand called JBL Authentics. This brand launched in August with the Authentics 500 and Authentics 200 home speakers and the Authentics 300 portable speaker. Each corresponds very closely to a similar Sonos speaker—the Era 500, Era 100, and Move 2, respectively, and each offers similar specs and even higher pricing. The Authentics 500, for example, costs $700 and supports Dolby Atmos sound, just like the $449 Sonos Era 300.

The Authentics speakers work much like Sonos in that they support whole-house audio with multi-room playback over Wi-Fi and/or Ethernet and have automatic self-tuning capabilities. But a few things set the Authentics line apart from Sonos. These speakers all support both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. They all support using Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice assistants at the same time, whereas Sonos only lets you use one or the other (in tandem with its own assistant). They all have line-out audio ports, unlike most Sonos speakers. And they all support both Airplay and Google Cast/Chromecast, and not just Airplay like Sonos.

It’s not just JBL, of course, but these speakers are so obviously inspired by Sonos and exceeding Sonos in ways that I—and, I suspect, many others who would consider Sonos—think are important. Whatever their quality, whatever their relative costs, the Authentics line realizes the heterogenous dream of Sonos in ways that Sonos, itself, does not. And they will not be the only speakers to do so.

I’m far enough into Sonos financially that my switching costs are high, and I would need more information than I now have about any potential customer regardless. Also, the Sonos ecosystem is much more mature, and has a much wider range of products already. But JBL has offered a timely reminder that Sonos isn’t the only option for those who want a premium whole-house audio solution that can literally work with anything. And while it didn’t pick a fight with Google, its inability to compromise is starting to wear thin on at least this one customer.

It’s something I’ll be reminded of again each time I fire up our Sonos Play:5s and Sub on music night: The sound is powerful, crisp, and clear, but the app I have to use is lackluster and doesn’t do what I need. I wish there was a better way.