We’ve also been considering a native / direct integration with Sonos. Can you help me better understand what you would expect to see in a Sonos integration? What specific tiles and interactions would you expect?
Device-Centric Approach of SmartThings
One of the limitations with the SmartThings device model is everything must be a ‘device’ with a unique and persistent identifier.
As you may be aware, Sonos groups are much more ephemeral in nature - you can create them, remove them, regroup them, etc all on demand. So there’s not really a concept of ‘groups’ for the current Sonos integration with SmartThings other than being able to send some basic commands to the group that a device is associated with.
eg. For a specific speaker, you could send a muteGroup() command which would mute the group if the particular player/speaker was part of a group.
IFTTT takes a similar device-centric approach to their Sonos integration as SmartThings.
The content that follows includes brainstorming / conceptual design concepts.
Mixing Approaches
Device Centric
As we consider a direct integration with Sonos, we can see the potential for both approaches being valuable. Being able to have individual speakers available as tiles on a dashboard similar to the current device-centric integrations is certainly helpful. And perhaps grouping quick-actions for group commands for the device could be added to the Other Actions dialog:
Groups
Similarly, we’ve been thinking about a slightly different type of tile that would show the various music groups available within a home. This would enable you to setup a single tile and position it on your dashboard like a normal tile and it would show a scrollable view of the groups that are available (if any).
That way depending on your preferred approach to managing multi device or multi group music playback, you could choose which option worked best for you.
