Sonos begins to add support for Apple Music

Sonos has added partial support for Apple Music to its smart speakers. For now, the streaming service is only accessible on Sonos One and Sonos Beam devices. The integration is rolling out across the U.S., UK, and Ireland. All it takes is enabling the Alexa skill for Apple Music on that device.

For those curious about when support will reach other markets, the Sonos social media team tweeted that it is at least somewhat bottlenecked by the international presence of Amazon Alexa, the only voice assistant currently available on its smart speakers, and its work with Apple. “When Apple Music Alexa control becomes available in a new region, it takes dedicated engineering and testing to bring support to Sonos,” the company tweeted. “We don’t have a timeline to share today for when Apple Music Alexa control will be available on Sonos in your region but stay tuned.”

This is a big move from two businesses that have been slow to adopt new partners in the smart speaker space. Apple in particular is known for creating closed ecosystems. The Apple Music streaming service was limited to the Apple HomePod for many months, with a rollout to Amazon Echo devices late last year.

Sonos is interested in gathering more partners. It has been collaborating to get the Google Assistant voice AI platform on its smart speakers for years, although a CES 2019 demo showed that progress is happening on that front.