Sonos 7.0 arrives with full Spotify speaker control

Spotify users with Sonos speakers can now control their whole-house music playback directly from the Spotify app, with a new update pushed out today. Sonos 7.0 allows you to spend less time in the company's own app and more time where your playlists live. When you hit play, you can now choose one or more of your Sonos speakers as the output, rather than just streaming through your phone.

Sonos has had Spotify playlist support since the two services first announced compatibility. Still, there's no denying that Spotify's software is easier to use and more full-featured from a music standpoint, especially with the arrival of things like Discover playlists and the other music-discovery tools. Even if you do start playing with the Spotify app, mind, you can still control it with the Sonos app as well.

It also means that it's easier to switch music from playing on your phone – for instance through your headphones – over to your Sonos speakers. Alternatively you could go in the opposite direction, switching from Sonos to headphones as you leave the house in the morning. Within the Spotify app you can adjust volume of individual Sonos speakers, in addition to grouping and ungrouping rooms.

Perhaps even more useful are collaborative playlists. It was always possible to get a friend to download the Sonos app on their phone and start adding tracks, but that also gave them access to all of your music and playlists, whether locally or stored in the cloud. With Sonos 7.0, however, if they're on the same WiFi network as your Sonos speakers, they should be able to play tracks from their Spotify app instead.

The feature had been available to more adventurous users willing to sign up to Sonos' beta program. Trialled since the start of November, the beta did have a couple of limitations, not least that it was only compatible with Android, Windows, and macOS. If you wanted to use an iOS device like your iPhone, you were out of luck.

That's no longer the case with the official Sonos Controller 7.0 release today, which will happily play on iPhones and iPads too. If you source all your music from Spotify, you may well find that you never open the Sonos app again, though you'll need to register your Sonos account and update your speakers to the latest version the first time.

Sonos 7.0 is available now as a free download. The first time you open the app after updating, you should be prompted to install the new software to the Sonos speakers themselves.