Early last year, as part of an ongoing and well documented legal feud with Sonos, Google had the choice to eitherchange the way its smart speakers workor stop selling them in the US entirely. Unsurprisingly, it chose the former, resulting in changes to the way group volume controls function in Chromecast speaker groups. Now, citing “a recent legal decision,” Google says that new Nest devices will only be able to be added to a singlespeaker groupat any given time.
9to5Google reportsthat Google has begun enforcing limitations on speaker groups, withGoogle’s support documentationspelling out that many of its own devices “can only belong to one speaker group in the Google Home app at a time,” further elaborating that trying to add the devices to subsequent groups will result in an error message. The devices this limitation applies to are:
Under this new arrangement, the devices listed above — every Chromecast-enabled device Google currently offers — will only be able to be added to one speaker group in Google Home. That means that, for example, a speaker group for a single room can’t comprise speakers that are already in another group for an entire home, and vice versa. While the limitation may seem arbitrary, it seems obvious it’s a concession in the ongoing dispute with Sonos, even if Google hasn’t specifically said as much.
Sonos has been persuing legal action against Googlefor years, alleging that Google infringed on a number of Sonos patents in creating the software that powers multi-room audio through Chromecast-enabled speakers. In 2016, Sonos made an attempt to reach a licensing agreement with Google, but the two parties couldn’t come to terms on specific figures, with Sonos saying that Google offered rates the former described as “almost nothing.”
For what its worth, a Google spokesperson has told 9to5Google that “There are no changes to existing speaker groups,” which seems to indicate any speakers currently included in multiple groups won’t be removed. That may be reassuring to folks who already have lots of devices, but it doesn’t do much for anyone looking to build out a Nest speaker setup.
