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Chinese Smart Home powerhouse Aqara, have recently announced a collaboration with smart audio speaker company Sonos. This cooperation will take the form of automations and control between both the Aqara Home app, and Sonos speakers.

Now whilst this doesn’t exactly seem like anything relevant to HomeKit per se, the fact that both Sonos and Aqara work individually with Apple HomeKit – Aqara switches and sensors have a foot in both their own ecosystem and HomeKit, whilst Sonos produce Airplay 2 speakers, that are exposed to HomeKit – it does mean that Aqara’s HomeKit compatible products could possibly create automations that aren’t currently possible, or at least not as easy to achieve in HomeKit, but are entirely possible with the Aqara Home app. This then could enable hitherto unthought-of possibilities with both Sonos speakers, alarms and even currently unsupported devices, like the Aqara cube.

This Sonos collaboration follows on from the Ikea – Sonos speaker venture, and the recent announcement from Terncy/Xiaoyan with their Smart Dial being compatible with both HomeKit and Sonos, so there does seem a lot of movement towards multiple connections. Regardless of how ‘HomeKit’ this all is, it’s an exciting development towards smart home and smart audio integration for those that have been waiting for such progress.

Thanks to Mariusz Szwed for the tipoff.