Feature Request: Multi-Speaker Grouping and Android App for ESP32

[jbew81]

Hello @tostmann,
First of all, thank you for your great work on SixBack. It's always a pleasure to discover the new features and improvements you regularly publish !
I've been using it with my 5 Bose SoundTouch devices and it works really well.
I would like to submit two ideas for future development:
1. Grouping More Than Two SoundTouch Speakers
Would it be possible to add support for grouping more than two Bose SoundTouch speakers directly from the SixBack interface?
Currently, when I want to play music on all of my speakers, I still need to use the official Bose SoundTouch application to create the multi-room group. I own five SoundTouch devices, and it would be fantastic if SixBack could manage the grouping of all of them without relying on the Bose app.
For example, being able to select multiple speakers (up to all available devices) and start synchronized playback directly from SixBack would greatly improve the user experience.
2. Android Application
Do you have any plans to develop an Android application in the future that could communicate directly with the ESP32 and provide the same controls as the web interface?
A native Android app could make daily usage even more convenient, especially for users who mainly interact with their SoundTouch devices from smartphones.
Thank you for considering these ideas, and thanks again for maintaining this project.
Best regards,

[tostmann]

Thanks for the clear write-up — two separate topics, so let me take them one at a time.

1. Grouping more than two speakers

Good news on the mechanism: SixBack already builds multi-room zones by talking to the speakers directly (the same /setZone + /addZoneSlave calls the Bose app uses), and that path is not limited to two speakers on the firmware side. I just verified a three-speaker zone end-to-end on test hardware — one master plus two members join and leave cleanly.

What's limiting you today is purely the web UI: the "Group with" control is a single-select dropdown, so it only ever forms a two-speaker zone. Lifting that to a multi-select (and adding an "add speaker to existing zone" button) is a UI change with no firmware risk, and I've put it on the backlog. With five speakers you'd then be able to build one zone across all of them from SixBack instead of reaching for the Bose app.

One honest caveat: I've verified three speakers; I haven't yet tested four or five in a single zone, and very large zones can run into the speakers' own sync limits — that's a Bose-firmware property, not something SixBack controls. So I'll validate larger zones before calling it done.

2. Native Android app

There's no native app, and I'm not planning to build one — but the web UI is a responsive single-page app (viewport meta + mobile breakpoints), so it already works in a phone browser, and you can "Add to Home Screen" to get an app-like launcher. If a native wrapper matters to you, the whole project is open source and a PR (or a thin WebView wrapper repo) would be welcome; the REST API the UI uses is stable and documented in the code.

I'll update this thread once the multi-select grouping lands.