Saving Playlists via Android phone

Playlist are available system wide and are listed on all controllers. It is assumed that a mobile device will not always be available to other controllers, thus it will not allow songs located on mobile devices to be added to playlists.

That is crazy.

I can see the sense in it. In your scenario, I have a playlist that has items on my phone. I then go to work, and someone in the house decides to play that playlist. But when Sonos looks for the source of the music, which is my phone, it's no longer on the network, and consequently the playlist won't play properly.

Sonos made a conscious decision not to allow mobile devices to serve on playlists. The do allow computers, even laptops, to act as sources, so you could put your music there, and have the playlist refer to that device, or set up an NAS, and have the music always available in that fashion.

Thanks. However, I think it could be argued that a laptop is a mobile device. I'd have thought convergence should be the aim to provide the customer with as much flexibility as possible.

Yes, there's no real reason I'm aware of and Sonos could just skip past songs that are unavailable - just like it does when my NAS isn't on or the internet off (for Spotify tracks).

Exactly...

Not defending Sonos, just stating how I perceive what they did. And I'd agree that you could argue a laptop is a mobile device....but how can the system recognize the difference between a laptop and a desktop, since they both run the same operating system? And why couldn't I move a desktop from home to home, or even a NAS? I think they had to draw the line somewhere, and made a choice.

And as technology continues to evolve, I think the decisions that were taken have the potential for being looked at under a different light. We'll have to wait and see how Sonos makes alterations, but some of the efforts might require an entire rewrite of the foundational code, which would be expensive, in many ways.

But why couldn't the line be:
'It's your system - you may even only use your phone for music playback. All sources can be saved into a playlist. If any of those sources are unavailable then obviously the music won't play.'
No distinction or complication needed then.
That's how the queue works for God's sake. If I play a track from my phone but then it's not available it will just be skipped in the queue. It's probably extra code to check and give errors when trying to save that queue that such and such device's content can't be saved to the playlist.

Don't disagree. But they'll have to move with the times (and technology) or start losing out. Customers can be fickle.....