Earlier this week Sonos announced a plethora of new perks to the Sonos platform like immediate Amazon Alexa voice control, Google Assistant on the way, a refreshed app, additional third party control and Apple AirPlay 2 (coming in 2018). The company also announced its brand new Sonos One speaker with a six-mic array and Alexa built-in. Big day for Sonos!
Perhaps the biggest news for CE pros is this: starting in 2018, Sonos will open its developer program “completely” and deliver APIs to any developer who wants to build customer experiences on the Sonos platform.
The company also rolled out a certification program, which earns partners the “Works with Sonos” badge.
Ryan Taylor, director of partnerships, Sonos, explains the difference.
“We’ve been making a shift with our partners,” says Taylor. “Last year we announced our endorsed partner program, with Control4, Savant and Crestron and other folks, and transitioned into a cloud platform that we’ve been using for Spotify integration and direct control. We used the same platform for all of our Alexa work, and eventually we’d love for everybody to be using it.”
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Starting today, he says, the Sonos developer program is open, with more than 100 partners already working on the platform today.
Next year, it’ll be open to anybody (this is the “completely” open API). So anyone will be able to come in as a developer and say ‘Hey, I want to build an app that integrates with Sonos.’
During the keynote, Sonos showed a slide to represent a few of the 100 companies currently developing with its open API, including Logitech, URC, Control4, Somfy and Deezer.
Alright, So What Is ‘Works with Sonos’?
“When we say ‘Works with Sonos,’ we’re talking about the partners that have already gone through our certification program,” says Taylor. “Everybody else you see has access to the API (that’s the 100 folks working on it), but the eight or so we showed, including Lutron, iPort and Wink, they have gone through the certification process and earned the Works with Sonos badge.”
Works with Sonos means the company has signed off on the integration through its certification program; that Sonos has tested everything and made sure everything is running properly, in order to ensure the level of quality that customers expect.
“[Works with Sonos] is going to be especially important as we open the platform,” Taylor adds. “Developers don’t get that certification unless they submit. But they don’t have to if they don’t want to. The badge is just the marker of, we’ve seen it, we know about it, we endorse this thing. But [with the open API] anybody can still develop around Sonos.”
The first certified partners will begin rolling out in the coming weeks, starting with Lutron, Crestron, iPort, Wink, Alarm.com, Wrensilva, TunesMap, Yonomi and Enno.
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