Can I play music via the Sonos app on a Roam in Bluetooth mode?

I would be very, very surprised if this were possible.  The Sonos app isn’t a music player, it’s just a controller. And since the Roam would not have internet access to play audio, it can’t play the audio either.  You surely would need to use other apps to play music.

Thanks Danny. It’s what I assume as well, although the app would have mobile internet connection via the phone.

Presuming you are correct, the transition to/from WifFI & Bluetooth won’t be quite as “seamless” as the marketing suggests.

There are of course now many ways to play music on Sonos when networked other than the Sonos app, for example using the native apps directly for Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, Amazon Music…..

There is still some truth in what you say.  We’ll have to see how it all works in due course.

Sure - I’ve been an owner of multiple Bluetooth speakers over time, so very familiar in how they work with native apps. In fact I’ve put my pre-order in for a Roam primarily to replace a Bang & Olufsen A1 that I lost recently in a house move.

What would be better though (for me at least) would be access to all my music services via the Sonos app, including my Sonos playlists, when away from WiFi, which will be my use case >99% of the time. I have a Move which I use in the garden so unlikely to use the Roam at home.

I wonder if there’s a way around it by creating a WiFi hotspot from my Wife’s phone and connecting both my iPhone and the Roam that way? Guess we’ll find out in a few weeks 

Technically, bluetooth doesn’t work through native apps on your phone/tablet, it works through the OS on your phone tablet.  In other words your app just plays the audio and the OS determines wheter the audio on it’s speakers or a connected BT device.

There are two scenarios that would need to occur for this to happen.  The first is that the Sonos app becomes a music player as well as controller.  That’s a lot of extra development and cost for Sonos to absorb, probably not with additional revenue.  As well, I imagine that many streaming service would not license a Sonos app to directly play their content, instead of using the streaming app they built and have full control over.  It’s a completely different situation than streaming to a smart speaker directly.  The one streaming where I think this would be something Sonos could do is Sonos radio.

The other scenario is for Sonos to push you to the appropriate app when you make a playlist request.  For example, if a spoltify song is on your playlist, Sonos has a call to Spotify to open and play that song.  Sounds complicated, and again, not sure if the streaming app would be ok with this.

This is a work around that others have done in the past.  You can do this with any Sonos speaker, since you aren’t using bluetooth at all.  The question is, is all that effort really worth it instead of using bluetooth and your streaming app?

As Danny says, this is just using a different wifi network and nothing specifically to do with the Roam.  I have at times in the past set my mobile hotspot with the same SSID and password as my home network to facilitate this.

Thanks for the replies John & Danny!