While we like our Sonos player for its excellent functionality and usability across an abundance of devices, it unfortunately is missing an official Apple Watch app, which would really round things out.
As we’ve discovered thus far, Sonos is really easy to set up on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. Similarly, you can add a plethora of streaming services to round out your music listening experience.
When it comes to the Apple Watch however, you have to look elsewhere to join the Sonos party. ZonePlay is an unofficial Sonos app that works on your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. For $3.99, it’s actually quite good and being able to control your Sonos player from your wrist is well worth the price.
How to Set Up a New Sonos Speaker
How to Add Streaming Services to Your Sonos Player
ZonePlay can be purchased from the App Store.
Using the app, you can see and stream music to your “zones,” which are just your Sonos players and the rooms to which they are associated. In our case, we have one player in our Office, so that is our only zone.
If you tap on the “Music” button at the bottom of the app, you can switch between your Favorites, Playlists, Library (seen below in the Albums view), and TuneIn Radio.
On the Watch side of things, you get your very own ZonePlay app, seen below circled in red.
ZonePlay is considerably stripped down, having only the ability to play music that has been favorited on the Sonos apps.
Nevertheless, whatever you do have in your Favorites is easily controlled with the ZonePlay Watch app.
When you pick something to play, you’ll be presented with some choices. If want to play something after your current selection, you can choose to play it next or you can add it to the queue to play at some point, eventually, depending on how large your queue is.
Finally, once you are playing something, you can pause/play, skip forward and backward, and change the volume.
Note, you’re not completely limited to playing Favorites on the Watch app. Whatever you’re playing on the Sonos app …
Will also be playing on the ZonePlay iOS app.
And, thus it can also be controlled from the Watch app as well.
So, if you’ve set up a rather large queue on your desktop or from your iPhone or iPad, you can putter about the house with only your Watch and control the playback from your wrist.
Until Sonos releases an official Apple Watch app (if they ever do), ZonePlay will have to do the trick. Thankfully, it works very well with zero configuration and effort. It’s a little unfortunate that you can only access music favorites rather than having access to your entire music collection, but given the smallness of the Watch interface, and the largeness of some collections, that’s probably not a bad thing.
That you can control everything, once it is initiated on the desktop or mobile app, including playback of local and streaming music is also a huge plus. So, if you’ve been looking for a way to control your Sonos player from your Apple Watch, you might want to give ZonePlay a try.