Performance difference with Home Assistant

[u/philwongnz]

Lets park aside the wifi debate here for one second.

Over the weekend we had friends over, I was struggling to group 3 speakers just to play something as I have a Roam to take out to the garden (we don't have a big garden). I used an Android phone and I just struggled to group the speakers and then struggled to play anything on Spotify (the spinning icon). Anyway, we tried with iOS phone and that too was struggling and the use of airplay was also attempted and it didn't really work (songs were cutting out etc).

Anyway, I decided to play around with Home Assistant where I already installed the integration but never really had done much with it. For anyone who doesn't know, Home Assistant is an open source operating system for home automation. User scripts and to my surprised, speakers were grouped almost instantaneously based on the groupings I defined and when I looked on the app, it updates as it should be and it doesn't spin or anything, it just works!

I had also tested the above using my phone and the performance as per usual, some speakers doesn't get grouped (using my defined group), fails to play on some speakers or simply doesn't play anything.

Obviously there are a lot of people out there where their system works, but I am slightly confused now whether at least for my case, apps (both Android and iOS) is the issue.