Answered

iOS app taking forever to launch

  • 12 October 2017
  • 5 replies
  • 563 views

Userlevel 2
Since the last update rolled out a few days ago the Sonos app on my phone is taking forever and a day to launch. I timed it this afternoon, the black "Sonos" screen was there for four and a half minutes before the app finally came up. This has been the case every time I've tried to open the app to turn my system on or off or change the station. Needless to say, it is tiresome. Once the app appeared all was good. Is this problem unique to me? What might it be thinking about while it's sitting there? Any suggestions beyond the obvious of power cycling everything? (didn't help) The app on my Mac comes up as fast as usual. All systems are running the most recent versions of software, as of this morning.
icon

Best answer by rwiegand 12 October 2017, 22:03

View original

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

5 replies

Interesting. None of my iOS device have an issue, which doesn't really help you, beyond telling you it's not a universal problem.

One of the things that frustrates me when I'm at work and taking a minute during lunch to answer questions here is the fact that the app requires a connection to a Sonos system before it will come up. My supposition is, since you've already rebooted the iOS device, is that there's some issue with your wifi that is keeping the phone or speakers to communicate through the router with each other. You weren't clear about that you really power cycled, so I'll fall back on the thing I really think will help resolve this issue.

Unplug your Sonos devices from the power. Then reboot your router, and allow it to come back up. Then plug back in the first Sonos device, using the one that may be wired to your router if you have one. Once it's had enough time to boot up as well, then plug in the next, and repeat for as many Sonos devices you have.

You may want to look at your iPhone as well. While supposedly in 7.4 they fixed the issue with the "Wifi Assist" setting in iOS, you may want to double check and turn that off, in case your phone is hanging on to its cell signal, and not actually connecting to your wifi immediately.
Userlevel 2
I didn't do it in that order, so I'll try again. I should have mentioned that the Sonos devices are all connected by wired ethernet. Until last week the behavior was that the app would launch right away and then complain that it couldn't find a Sonos device if there was some connectivity problem.
Yea, duplicate IP addresses can happen whether they're wired or on wifi, unfortunately. It's exposed by the fact that the app update process does a soft reboot of the speakers, so they have to request new IP addresses. If your router is in a state where it doesn't remember what it's handed out, you can get the issue.

Unfortunately, an IP address is held at both ends of the process. Both the speaker remembers it, and the router does as well, so that if one goes away, the other can say "go back to X, it's where I was before". The process above basically clears all memory of that particular piece of data, and forces a new IP address to be given out. I often recommend figuring out how to set up reserved IP addresses that are out of the normal range that the router hands out. My own router hands out starting at .00 in the range, so I've set up all of my Sonos devices with IP addresses that start at .75, so that even if the router can't remember what it's handed out, it's unlikely that it will give out something in the range that the Sonos devices are in.

Best of luck!
Userlevel 2
Resetting the network didn't do anything, but in chasing down another problem (persistent "no service" for voice calls) I did a "reset all settings" on my phone, (the irritating one that loses all of your passwords and any other customization you've done) and that appears to have fixed both problems, at least for the moment
Huh. That has me scratching my head. Glad it worked, though.

Did you happen to have a VPN set up at some point on the phone? That's the only thing that pops to mind, but that would be a "never connects" issue, not a "takes a long time to connect", I think.