The option is still there, just play your music via (through) the phone itself using a Music ‘Player’ App to your Sonos speaker, rather than using the ‘remote control’ Sonos App.

The Sonos App has never been a music player and the music never plays via the phone, it is sent direct from the audio source to your speakers, but you now need the music to go via the phone to change the volume using the Apple hardware volume controls. My own understanding is this is a change Apple introduced to help improve security of their iOS devices. So if you want this changed, then you need to speak to Apple.

Why would I buy a Sonos product when I can’t control volume in a straight forward fashion?  Because of this, my go to for music is my bluetooth speaker.  Sound is comparable to the Sonos and it’s much easier.  Sorry, but I won’t buy another Sonos product.

There are far more differences and use cases between Bluetooth and Sonos than the hard button volume.  They may not concern you, but they do make a difference for many, many others. 

The whole remote app excuse from sonos and their trolls here is lame.  Control your sonos through your spotify app and the iphone volume buttons work fine.  Somehow Spotify is able to accomplish everything Sonos apparently can’t figure out.  The trolls on here will respond with all the corporate talking points all day long: “its a remote” … thats simply an excuse.  Solve the problem—its why we pay you the big bucks for your product.

The simple fact is, the Sonos s2 app is buggy and a horrible user experience.  Until someone in Sonos SW development acknowledges app flaws, it will continue to suck. 

Sigh.  Yet another Apple fanboy whose Jobsian worship won't let them admit that it's Apple's fault the function got taken away, not Sonos' (am I doing this right?).

I got me one of them trolls—within seconds too!  Amazing.  As predicted, no reasoning or counter point attempted just vitriol.   As a long time sonos customer, troll input doesnt matter anyway—No more excuses Sonos!  Fix the app!!!

Yep, another Apple fanboy.  It's OK, Apple's not actually infallible.  Just admit it, you'll feel much better.

Sonos should just buy Apple. Then they can make them let Sonos bring back the volume buttons.

@PrescottGoggins What would you want Sonos to do about this? Apple does not seem to allow remotes access to these controls anymore, unless the app is rebuilt to be a music player (like Spotify or Apple Music), going against all Sonos stands for - having the speakers do all the work. All for a feature that’s already there in other real music players (as mentioned above). As I’ve read Apple threatens to pull the app from it’s store if you don’t go by the rules.

This may have been touched on in another post, but why not have Sonos app reconfigured with option to play through iOS device? No loss of revenue to Sonos since one buys the system and the speakers for their sound quality and convenience, and gets back functionality of hardware buttons and Lock Screen view (as was present in Sonos 1 app). Maybe one person in the world would use the Sonos app just to play on the phone, but you could limit use of the app to registered Sonos owners thus no revenue loss to Sonos. 

There's no way Sonos is going to spend the resources to re-engineer the app when the option to play through iOS devices already exists via Airplay.

Well, that would control the volume of audio on the phone, not the speakers, correct?  How does that help?  Even if you were able to group the phone audio and speaker audio, it still would be less than ideal to have to have the crappy phone audio interfering with the speaker audio just for volume control.

Perhaps more importantly, I seriously doubt that the various streaming services would allow Sonos to control the playback experience for phone/tablet use.  They create their own apps and features to differentiate and attract customers.  The Sonos app is a bit of an exception, somewhat grandfathered in since it existed before streaming services, to playback on speakers that don’t have their own UI.  I mean think about it, why doesn’t a aggreate streaming app for most popular streaming services already existing for your iphone or android tablet?