Brief experiment with Apple Music on the Amazon Echo

Read Apple Music is Now Available on the Amazon Echo for the (week old) scoop.

I have played around with this a little and there are still some major hang ups with using Apple Music on Amazon Echos.

In my limited testing, Echo did not always play requested music from my Apple Music account, even though Apple Music was set as the defaul music service to stream through when not otherwise specified.

Problem two: Amazon Echos can not stream to a group of Sonos speakers. This is pretty much a deal breaker as I can ask my HomePod to play music and have it send the output to a group of Sonos speakers via AirPlay 2. Echos can only stream from themselves.

Even the HomePod is early days enough that there are tons of hang ups with grouping speakers. It often forgets which speakers I like to AirPlay to and I have to readjust my groups in the AirPlay settings. This is a pain, but at least I have the option to do it.

I would love to see an update to the Home app and or Shortcuts app that allows me to create an automation that triggers music from pre-specified speaker groups at a specific time or based on my location. This is something that the Echo can do. Fingers crossed.