What specifically are your issues? What changes do you want? Just saying it's 'bad' is of no help.

100% agree with you on this, and any time spent looking at forums and reviews of the app will show that this is a widely held view (you need to sort reviews by ‘most recent’ and sift through the questionable - but inevitable - 5* reviews that claim this is the best app ever seen!).

The app is so poor on all of the platforms that I use - iOS, Mac OS and Windows. The navigation on Mac OS and Windows is laughably out of date. Apps were using this type of hierarchical menu navigation 15 years ago - it is infuriating, and finding (and discovering new) music in any of the app platforms is a non-starter.

No rewind or pause on radio streaming?!

The software developers at Sonos need to look at the Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon apps to see how a user interface can be done well, and make the artists, music, lyrics, music suggestions, etc. central to the experience and available in an intuitive way. One of the joys of using these apps is how they can lead you on a musical journey from artists and genres you know to new artists you have never heard of. (This happened to me on Apple Music this week - I went from the artist Bonobo and found the amazing Broken Bells, and then on to Danger Mouse - artists only one week ago I had never previously been aware of). The Sonos app doesn’t do this at all because it is completely hobbled by its out of date navigation and features. 

Come on Sonos, make your software as market-leading as your hardware - it’s been too long!

@chrislz   You seem to be judging the Sonos app by comparing it with streaming service music player apps. Why do you consider that to be appropriate?

You also seem to be unaware that Sonos ceased development of the Windows and Mac apps years ago. They are dead men walking. Of course they are outdated.

Which streaming service?  Sonos provides an API to streaming services so that can provide and present the features of their service the way they want.  If one service has rewind/pause while another does not, it would be because that service didn’t enable the feature.  You may need to request a change with the service, or maybe ask Sonos to pass along the request.

  It could be that it’s time for Sonos to upgrade their API, but it would need to be done in a way that doesn’t break any services existing use of the API.  I’m not really sure what features are completely missing from the API though.

It’s impossible to rewind or pause a live stream. Internet radio stations work like terrestrial radio stations.

Carry your complain over to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon because the services implement their appearance on Sonos via SMAPI themselves. Sonos even provides the possibility to add lyrics to the Sonos app, it’s not their fault if the services don’t utilise every feature the API supplies.

It is completely appropriate, because I am forced to use the Sonos app to play music unless I switch to Airplay so that I can use the app. Isn’t that obvious?

As for your second point ‘Sonos ceased development of the Windows and Mac apps years ago’ it’s clear that they don’t seem to be bothered to update the navigation, but they still update the apps periodically with bug fixes, etc.

Do you work for Sonos - why would you seek to defend their lackadaisical attitude to their apps?

All Sonos employees who post in this forum are required to have an indication of their status as part of their avatar.

Why would you assume that someone whose opinion differs from yours must be a Sonos employee?

Re. radio streaming - I access radio stations through Global Player, BBC Sounds, etc. all of which offer live radio pause and rewind natively. Whether they extend this functionality to third parties, I’m not sure?

Re. SMAPI, again I don’t know the details of this but this is a Sonos implemented API, which looks quite old (following your link - looks like it uses older API protocols). Any third party content supplier will presumably be limited by what the Sonos API can do? 

My point on this is that Sonos could surely work a lot harder to enhance their own music browsing capabilities in their own app to get closer to what the third party suppliers have done - all of the third party apps have constantly evolved their apps to be better and better. Sonos seemingly have not!

The whole basis of @chrislz 's comments is flawed. The Sonos app is a remote control for the Sonos system, not a music player. The need for a design thst can incorporate any number of music services places constraints that just don't exist for the individual streaming services. The Sonos app serves a totally different purpose. 

And now here's a thing.  @chrislz likes the musical journey that the Apple Music app takes him on. But others may prefer the way the Spotify app does this, or Amazon Music, or Tidal or Pandora. So here is an idea: why don't Sonos make it possible for all those apps to play direct to Sonos? Ah, of course, they already do.

Apple Music isn't on board with that yet...but there's always Airplay.

Fair enough Bruce, but it is not just my opinion as I mentioned previously, and I genuinely find it hard to believe that anyone could defend such poor apps, for all of the reasons I have mentioned. 

Rather than simply shut-down people who criticise the app (which I have seen elsewhere on the forums) can we have a conversation about this? Do you think the apps are great?

Sorry I didn't realise that only criticism of Sonos was allowed on here and had to go unchallenged.

Who is shutting you down? I have disagreed with your views not challenged your right to make them. I think you are the one who is guilty of that

I didn’t perceive any attempt to shut down any conversation, merely additional data and contrary opinions. 

I don’t have any particular issues with the apps I use, but I also recognize many of the points others have raised, I.e Sonos’ app is merely a container app, which almost any source streamer can join, using the information on the Sonos partners page. The implication of this are that it’s unlikely that the API is frequently updated, companies don’t often have dedicated engineering time to update someone else’s code changes, and also limited support for ‘social’ features which aren’t common across multiple streams, since there’s virtually little benefit to Sonos to customize a common API just because company X has recently implemented this one ‘neat’ feature. 

This is the business model under which Sonos has chosen to operate. It may not be perfect for everyone. There are certainly other ways to go about this process, but at least in my perception, there would likely be significant impacts of doing so, both in functionality working properly across all potential streamers who are part of the ecosystem, and cost, either for Sonos, or each streamer. And possibly for us consumers.

And no, before you ask, I am not a Sonos employee, nor a paid shill of any type. 
 

   Personally, if the Apple music playing interface was the only game in town, I wouldn’t play.

I think the mobile app serves its purpose as a remote control for the Sonos system. The My Sonos section is a mess IMO.

The individual integrations of music services are to some extent constrained by the Sonos API and by the input from the services themselves. 

IMO, Sonos' approach of making it possible to play to Sonos direct from native apps, for example by making speakers Airplay and Spotify Connect compatible is a perfectly sensible strategy.

I respect the right of anyone to disagree with me.

Hi Steen, sorry that I hijacked your thread! I find it as frustrating as you that the apps are not what we would like. 

I’d also like to say to the other contributors that I got involved to contribute to a genuine conversation about the apps themselves, but perhaps some things I said have distracted from that and were misjudged - which was not my intention.

Genuine question that I have: Should Sonos improve their apps and seek to do some of the stuff that Spotify, et al do, or just leave all of that to third parties? I completely understand that the apps are there to control the hardware, but at the end of the day the whole point of Sonos is to play music, speech, etc. It seems to me that, since some third parties do not integrate directly with Sonos (e.g. Apple, as mentioned by @John B ), Sonos should invest in their apps to provide the best music searching facilities that they can - their products (and therefore sales?) would surely benefit from this?

By way of trying to understand Sonos’ approach, an analogy that springs to mind is camera manufacturers who produce generally poor software bundled with their products and leave the management and editing of photos to others…

If you’re not sure, then how can you be so sure your complaint?  I would guess that the rewind/pause functionality works through the native app as your app is actively storing previously played audio, up to a point.  Therefore, it can more easily retrieve locally stored data, rahter than request from a stremaing server to pick up a stream at a previous point in time.    Your phone has lots of memory to handle that.  The Sonos speakers, do not.

Yes. So it stands to reason that if a feature exists on one service, then it’s in the API, and a streaming service that doesn’t have the feature has not implemented it.  If you are talking about a feature that no service has implemented and doesn’t exist in the API, then you might have a point.

Or...third party suppliers could work harder to have their interface through Sonos to be more on par with the experience through their own native apps.

It’s not a matter of whether the app can be improved, but directing criticism to the right parties, and understanding what can or cannot be accomplished with the apps. Looking at the ascpect of the app that aren’t tied to third party streams,  I don’t think the app is great, but I do think there are a lot of moving parts and that what may seem to be an improvement in my head may actually cause a lot of issues I didn’t imagine.  I also tend to use the app less in favor of voice control or casting from a streamers native app.  I would be more in favor of development working on voice control improvements and new product develops, rather than big overhauls of the apps.

@chrislz . You believe that the Sonos app is poor. I believe that you believe that because you are judging it by criteria that are not appropriate for a control app for a multiroom, multisource, multiuser music system.

Let's agree to differ on that.

I don't believe the Sonos app is perfect. I understand that many people prefer the streaming service apps for playing their music and believe that the best solution is to make that possible for as many services as possible. 

You are aware of SMAPI, some I’m not seeing how are you now saying that Sonos doesn’t integrate with 3rd parties.  What sort of integration are you referring to?  Are you referring to casting from native apps to Sonos.

A point that should be mentioned is that Sonos provides the SMAPI to streaming vendors, not because they don’t want to do the work themselves, but for two important reasons.  One is that there are limited resources on the speakers themselves, and they don’t have the space for handling a different interface protocol for each streaming service that wants to be on Sonos.  Perhaps more importantly, the streaming service needs to own the experience with their service, even through a third party like Sonos.  Surely they want to own it, and Sonos would not want to get in a situation where it appears they are presenting one service in a better way than others. Letting the services control the experience gives them full control and responsibility for their products.

I don't doubt for a second the better music exploration experience that @chrislz had with the Apple Music app.  I think Sonos has too many other balls to juggle to even attempt to match that in the Sonos app. I could, of course, be wrong. 

If you check out the Spotify integration in the Sonos app, you can see that’s definitely possible to have a nice integration even with suggestions etc. but as mentioned here before, the music services need to implement it and use the provided API.

I agree that the app needs a makeover, especially the Windows version.

I would love to have more flexibility in My Sonos Favorites, for example make folders to arrange my favorites into.

Another option would be to give me better search results when I search in the Sonos app for an artist in the services Mixcloud or Soundcloud

To repeat, Sonos is no longer providing anything beyond bug updates to their desktop controllers, both Windows and Mac, and have indeed removed much of their functionality at this point. Further feature development will only occur in the mobile versions of the controller, until Sonos changes course. 

Search results come directly from the music service via SMAPI. If you are unhappy with the results from those music services, you need to take it up with them. Sonos have nothing whatsoever to do with search results (of course, think about it, how could they?), they just display them.