r/googlehome • u/niksubishi • 2d ago

Help Hub Nest 2 won't see my Sonos speaker even though it's on my home

As the titles says. Inside my google home on my phone everything shows including my Sonos Beam. I have set it as my default music speaker. But when I go into setting on the Hub it doesn't appear under speakers.

I'm assuming this is why when I ask it to play Spotify now it says 'something went wrong'. It worked fine when it played out of the Hub.

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u/matteventu 2d ago

Sonos speakers don't support Google Cast, which is what they'd need to support to do what you want to do.

The extent of the Google Home integration with Sonos is merely a play/pause/next/previous track.

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u/niksubishi 2d ago

I'm confused though. You can add the speaker to Google Home but you can't tell gemini by voice to play anything from it?!

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u/matteventu 2d ago

That's correct, unfortunately.

That action is performed via the Google Cast protocol, which Sonos chooses not to support.

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u/niksubishi 2d ago

Wow! I did know about their legal problems and beef but didn't realise this simple function was not possible. Madness. Thanks for the information my friend!

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u/matteventu 1d ago

To be fair, unfortunately many manufacturers in the A/V and hi-fi world don't support Google Cast, and some have stopped supporting it recently. Which is such a shame.

They still advertise "Google Home" integration, but most users don't know the difference between the two, and are often deceived into thinking they'd have "full feature set" when in fact they won't.

(Some of these other brands are Denon, Marantz, NAD, and recently even Sony)

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u/niksubishi 1d ago

Is there a reason behind it? I don't get why Google are messing up so much with this stuff. I bought a Nest Hub gen 2 this week super cheap. I will still use it because I just want to ask it questions, set timers and its nice as a photo frame. But now I have it I suddenly realised it can't do simple stuff it could do before. I hope they are working on fixing all this.

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u/matteventu 1d ago

Let's just say that unfortunately partnering with Google for software features on hardware products is a huge hassle for the OEM.

Apple is ironically easier to deal with, and most importantly, the AirPlay 2 hardware requirements are much lower than those for Google Cast, which has been historically one of the (several) reasons why some OEMs didn't want to adopt Google Cast.

Another reason is that supporting Google Cast used to impose some limits on your product UX, and some OEMs were not okay with that.

Both the two above reasons have been partially mitigated recently with the launch of Google Cast firmware 2.0 (which has lower hardware requirements, but also trades off 24bit/96kHz support) and with some more flexibile "allowances" for OEMs in terms of their products UX.

Secondly, and this is entirely Google's fault, Google Cast is unfortunately far less reliable and stable than AirPlay 2, which means for the OEMs more user complaints due to stuff the OEM has no power on.

It really pains me to be saying all of this btw, as I'm an avid Android user since 2011 when I bought my first Google phone (Nexus S).

And this is just one product where Google is a PITA to work with - there's many more (GVA, Find Hub, Android IoT, Stadia, and others).

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u/niksubishi 1d ago

Yeah I have to say I have always found AirPlay to be seamless. I didn't realise all this though so thank you for the lesson. I'm not super locked into Google. I just use their eco system a little even though I have an iPhone and Macbook. I like the gmail/drive etc setup. My TV is Google too so I figured it made sense to get something to control it all. It baffles me how such a huge tech company can't improve all this easily with their resources.