Sonos + AirPlay, a Love Story (Premium)

I purchased my first Sonos wireless smart speaker, a Play:1, several years ago when we were still living in Massachusetts. I was happy enough with the sound quality and performance that I later purchased a second Play:1, creating a stereo pair in our living room. I even installed corner shelves for them, drilling a hole in the back of each so that the speakers’ cables could reach the power receptacles more elegantly.

And that’s how it starts with this kind of thing, isn’t it? I did a bit of research and was intrigued by Sonos but alarmed by the high prices of their initial speaker offerings, the ZonePlayer S5/Play:5 and the Play:3. But over time, Sonos augmented its product line with the less expensive Play:1 and so I took a shot. Today, we own over a dozen Sonos products, and at a heady cost: we have $2000 of Sonos equipment in our sunroom alone, between a pair of Play Fives, a Sub, and a Boost, though our out-of-pocket expenses were only $1500 because we got the Play Fives used.

I’ve written about my Sonos usage before, of course. In early 2020, I moved from Google Cast/Chromecast to Sonos for whole-house audio after Google killed off the Chromecast Audio, which was a terrific little device (and still would be today). You can read about that in Rethinking Whole-House Audio: Sonos (Premium). And a year later, in The Lure of Sonos (Premium), I wrote about why premium products like Sonos are often worth the cost, and not just in an attempt to justify my Sonos speaker purchases.

To me, the cost of Sonos isn’t the issue. We use most of our Sonos speakers regularly: we have a Sonos Beam soundbar and a Sonos Move that are used daily, for example, a pair of IKEA Symfonisk bookshelf speakers that are used near-daily, and we listen to music in the sunroom at least once a week. And those original Play:1s? My daughter uses them every day, now from her dorm room in North Carolina.

Instead, my issue with Sonos is related to its ecosystem and its place in the broader market for audio and entertainment. As we’ve discussed in the past, ecosystems matter. And I mean that broadly: you need to understand what you’re getting into when you adopt this kind of thing. Apple is perhaps a classic example: its products and services tend to work really well together and many of its users love that. But Apple also engages in anticompetitive practices that, among other things, sometimes make it harder for its users to effectively use competing products and services on Apple devices.

This is well understood. But it is perhaps less well-understood that other, smaller, tech companies, like Sonos, create ecosystems that have their own challenges. Both generally and for their users. And looking at Sonos specifically, I think it’s fair to say that its legal battles with Google have had a negative effect on those customers who use products and services from both companies.

To be clear, I support Sonos in its fight with Google because the history is very clear: under the pretense of partnering with Sonos, Google learned the secrets to their whole house audio solutions, stole them, and then implemented them in their own products like Chromecast, Google Home, and the Google Nest speakers. Sonos, as the inventor and owner of those technologies, rightfully expected Google to pay for their use in the form of licensing, and when Google simply ignored those requests, it sued. And won. Big time.

So how has this impacted me? I do know that Google has made some of its hardware less useful by trying (somewhat half-heartedly, based on this week’s news) to workaround its intellectual property (IP) theft. But I don’t use Google Home for much beyond occasionally checking on the health of my Wi-Fi network, and not at all for purposes of media streaming. So that’s not been an issue: I use Sonos for that anyway.

What I did notice occurred when Google transitioned from Google Play Music to YouTube Music, and I now attribute this regression to the Sonos/Google legal battle. With Google Play Music, I could control my Sonos speakers directly from the Google app. But YouTube Music does not support that functionality. So I have instead been forced to use the Sonos app, which is terrible. (More on that in a moment.)

You may not understand what that means. But Sonos allows third-party apps to play directly to its speakers using its proprietary, Wi-Fi-based technology. This is similar to how Bluetooth works, I guess, except that Sonos has, of course, figured out multi-room streaming and other advanced features. So compatible apps, like Spotify, can stream directly to Sonos speakers, as they can to Bluetooth speakers. But they can also stream directly to multiple Sonos speakers, including speaker pairs. One could use Spotify to play music to every single Sonos speaker in a home, for example. This is true on both Android and iOS.

Google Play Music could also do this. But YouTube Music cannot, despite it being one of the most highly ranked pieces of user feedback. (And you thought only Microsoft ignored feedback.) And because I use YouTube Music, and otherwise love it, I’ve had to put up with the Sonos app, which is not ideal. How it’s not ideal depends on the app. But with music in general, or YouTube Music in particular, I can cite two issues that bother me every time my wife and spend the evening listening to music.

First, you cannot easily edit the Now Playing list, and there are two things I typically want to do regularly: remove certain songs from the list, or move them to a new position. (You can add music easily enough.) In YouTube Music, you can do this directly: just display what it calls Up Next and swipe left to delete or up/down to move songs, it just works. In Sonos, you cannot. Instead, you have to move into an Edit mode, which requires two steps: tap Queue, then tap Edit, then make whatever changes you want. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s tedious.

Second, you cannot add or remove music from YouTube Music-based playlists from the Sonos app (or, presumably, from other services). This, too, is tedious. A big part of most music nights is us discovering new music or suggesting songs, and we don’t always want the songs we like to just happen in the moment, we sometimes want to add songs we like to an existing playlist. Or, in the case of songs that aren’t working out, remove them. So I need to manage two apps on these nights, Sonos for playing the music and YouTube Music to manage the playlists. It’s ridiculous. (It’s also not real-time: changes made to YouTube Music playlists will not reflect in Sonos if they’re currently playing.)

There are other issues with the Sonos app that are unrelated to music generally or YouTube Music specifically. The biggest is sync: when I pick up the playback of a podcast (through Pocket Casts) or an audiobook (Audible) on Sonos, it will always correctly start at the right location. But when I later go back to the original app—Pocket Casts or Audible—it will almost always not be in the right location; generally speaking, it forgets whatever bit I had listened to on Sonos. I blame Sonos for that.

What these issues point to is that the Sonos app is lackluster and undesirable. And that playing your content from the originating app—YouTube Music, Pocket Casts, and Audible, in my case—is always preferable. As noted, YouTube Music does not support this. Neither does Pocket Casts. But Audible does. So in that case, I can use the real app and not worry about sync issues, on Android or iOS.

But here’s the thing. In December, I switched from Android to the iPhone. And where Android supports Chromecast, which of course does not work with Sonos—see the above legal issues—the iPhone and Apple’s other devices support AirPlay 2, which at a high level is similar: both technologies allow you to direct the “casting” (streaming) of music/audio from the cloud to compatible speakers (and other devices) from your smartphone or another device, and both support multiple speakers, so they enable multi-room and whole house audio.

I can’t cast to Sonos on Android. But I can stream to Sonos on the iPhone and, stupidly, from the iPad I’d been using all along, even back when I was still using an Android phone. And that means that I could have been controlling my Sonos speakers from outside the Sonos app this whole time. It just never occurred to me.

Many iPhone (and iPad) apps support this directly. For example, Pocket Casts has a prominent AirPlay button in its Now Playing screen, at the bottom.

And when you tap that, you will see a list of all of the available AirPlay-compatible speakers, including those made by Sonos. And because AirPlay supports multiple speakers, you can take advantage of that, too.

The Audible app works similarly via a “Connect to a Device” button that, on iOS, supports Sonos, AirPlay, and Bluetooth devices. And with Sonos and AirPlay, you of course get multi-speaker support.

YouTube Music, amazingly, also supports AirPlay directly on iOS. When you start music playback, a “Connect to a device” icon appears in the upper right, giving direct access to Chromecast, AirPlay, and Bluetooth devices.

From here, you can select one or more AirPlay-compatible speakers, including those made by Sonos. This is an odd contradiction: you can’t do this on Android, which Google makes. But you can on the iPhone (and iPad).

But apps don’t even have to support AirPlay directly to use AirPlay. Instead, iPhone (and iPad) users can simply display the Control Center (by swiping down from the upper right of the screen) and find an AirPlay tile in the upper right that will already be populated with whatever content you’re playing in whatever app.

And when you select that, you get a nice mini-player with an AirPlay icon. Select that and you can add and remove other speakers. This is a great system, and whatever is playing also appears on the lock screen, which is also excellent.

Sonos offers other advantages to those who use an iPhone instead of an Android smartphone. For example, Apple users can automatically tune their Sonos speakers using a feature called Trueplay that “measures how sound reflects off walls, furnishings and other surfaces in a room, then fine-tunes your Sonos speaker to make sure it sounds great no matter where you’ve placed it.” (Some newer portable Sonos speakers, like the Move and Roam, offer Automatic Trueplay, which does what you expect.) This is not available to Android users.

But to me, the big deal here is that I want to use the originating apps to control media playback, not the Sonos app. And I could have been doing this all along on my iPad or, more recently, on iPhone. Now I am, of course, and I love it. And unless Sonos and Google figure out a compromise—which to me has to be Google licensing the Sonos technology—then they are collectively making it harder for me (and others) to return to the Android, and Pixel.

And I can’t imagine that’s in Google’s best interests.