The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

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Rhonny
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Sonos will not leave the app without basic playlist functionality long term. It will return before we know it. No-one would think they would remove it with no intention of reinstating it. 

No-one appears to have the ability to think rationally for themselves.

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

Bumper

We don't know exactly what functionality will be back. In the old app, you could also add songs to your Deezer playlist for example (and I assume you could do the same for Spotify and other services). Unclear if that's on the roadmap.

Not holding my breath for that one.

 

Now that I look at the roadmap again, I realise that it doesn't actually say anything about playlists. It only mentions the queue for early June... 

This is true and it could be longer than June. But I think queue functions and Sonos playlists are linked, like playlists depend on queue function so hopefully they are included.

But who can really say if they haven’t explicitly committed to it. Might be a week or months. 

M
Userlevel 4
Badge

Sonos will not leave the app without basic playlist functionality long term. It will return before we know it. Only an utter fool would think they would remove it with no intention of reinstating it. 

The absolute idiocy on here is beyond astounding. No-one appears to have the ability to think rationally for themselves.

Yeah!! It’s as stupid as just removing it from a working ecosystem used by millions… ooh.. wait...

Y
Userlevel 3

Sonos will not leave the app without basic playlist functionality long term. It will return before we know it. Only an utter fool would think they would remove it with no intention of reinstating it. 

The absolute idiocy on here is beyond astounding. No-one appears to have the ability to think rationally for themselves.

I think you’re missing the important points. There’s clearly quite a few technical professionals & specialists commenting on here, who know what professional companies should and shouldn’t do, because they’re probably proud of their work. Yes, of course core functionality might return, but it’s how this absolute farce has been delivered, along with the CEO & CTO’s blatant tone deaf attitudes to customers (ref quoted reports & interviews herein) that are utterly galling.

Waiting for some unknown future date isn’t the way forward - that’s like you buying a car and being told we’ll add the brakes, lights and horn to the to do list; we’ll do the brakes next month and lights a couple of weeks later - it drives, so you’re ok for now, but we’re not sure when we’ll get to look at the horn problem..,

The fact is that new software has been installed globally in one fail swoop, which clearly hasn’t undergone standard industry testing & best practice, hasn’t been rolled out methodically, doesn’t include a rollback plan (standard best practice) and has literally broken the systems. Whether you use specific functions obviously varies, but when software updates stop things working or make them work sporadically - whether they’re used or not - then that software is broken.

Yes, there’ll always be some comments that haven’t been thought through (like yours), but many are from people who very much know what they’re talking about and probably spend most of their working lives trying to make things work first time. I’m sure none of these problems are down to the Sonos dev team; it smells very much of Senior Management / Marketing pressure to get something out the door, regardless of how bad it is. Fire fighting. 😕

 

I
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Sonos will not leave the app without basic playlist functionality long term. It will return before we know it. Only an utter fool would think they would remove it with no intention of reinstating it. 

The absolute idiocy on here is beyond astounding. No-one appears to have the ability to think rationally for themselves.

A company that thinks it's a good idea to release a music app without the ability to edit the queue in 2024 is capable of anything. All rationality flew out the window last month. If someone had told me in April that Sonos would release an app this incomplete, I would have called them idiotic too...

And even if it's not long term, there's no telling how long we will have to wait. The roadmap is incomplete and vague. I wasn't blown away by the amount of added functionality over the last two updates.

John Guarr
Userlevel 4
Badge +5

I was on the phone for the past 1:40 m with your techs trying to add my music library to the new app and we received (913) error codes from both Music folder and selecting a folder on the computer.  The 3rd option NAS was similar equally unsuccessful.  What is both me and the tech missing?  It says in the message above, it states available now: 

  • Improved Local Music Library playback of folder

Very disappointed.

I’m not sure I understand your exact issue, but you mentioned NAS and that got my attention. My music library has been for years sitting on a Western Digital My Passport Ultra drive attached directly to a port on the back of my Linksys EA 8300 Router. Both iTunes and Sonos points to this drive, so when I purchase music using iTunes it goes to this drive and then I would just go into my Sonos app on my PC, update the music library, locate that song and transfer it to one of my Sonos playlists. Well since upgrading to the new app everything stopped working. I worked for hours with a knowledgeable tech from Sonos named Jules. He explained that the new Sonos app uses the SMB2 protocol to talk to NAS drives and I found out that my WD Passport is really not a NAS drive and it uses SMB1 protocol. Luckily I would back all my music up to a Western Digital My Cloud drive, which is a stand-a-lone NAS drive and this drive speaks using the SMB2 protocol. Once I pointed the Sonos app to my My Cloud NAS music directory it started to populate all my music. (i could only do this using the Sonos PC app since the IOS version is useless). I managed to keep some of my playlists, but I have many duplicates and larger playlists now so I have to go in and start deleting duplicates. So for NAS drives, the SMB2 protocol is important. Sonos told me that if I copied all my music from the My Passport  drive to a directory in Windows 10 it would work also since Windows 10 supports SMB2.  But overall, the PC version of the new Sonos app works okay, but the IOS version on my two iPads are horrible, There are no pull down menus and doesn’t show the songs in your playlists. So I have to keep running upstairs and making changes on my PC. When I go to the Help menu on the top row on the PC and go to About, it shows that I am running S2 version 16.2.  This is the version that Jules from Sonos, installed on my PC when he had remote access yesterday. I hope this might help someone. And I sure hope Sonos gets the IOS version working properly. It is very difficult to do anything using my iPad. 

M
Userlevel 5
Badge +1

Looking at the calendar, it is now early June. Where is our queue management? If your dev team has been permitted to leave the office in the past 3 weeks they aren’t dedicated to fixing this problem as much as they should be. 

Y
Userlevel 3

Looking at the calendar, it is now early June. Where is our queue management? If your dev team has been permitted to leave the office in the past 3 weeks they aren’t dedicated to fixing this problem as much as they should be. 

Tbf it’s Saturday / the weekend. I wouldn’t expect anything before Monday, and more likely midweek. “Early” has a way to go yet.

Everyone has to sleep, and I can assure you that the best thoughts don’t come when you have a banging head from reading and cross referencing pages of code. I’ve done my fair share of post midnight jobs and staying awake for up to 36 hours. It’s far from productive.

Also, realise this debacle is unlikely to be down to the tech team, it will be pressure from Senior Management & Marketing. If allowed, I’m sure the tech guys will fix things, but don’t give them a kicking online because they’re not going to be happy with this, and doing so only puts you backing the “bosses” who I suspect have instigated this 🤔

A
Userlevel 1

Sonos is deaf and blind, and no matter how many times it's told, it keeps blindly and deafly walking in the same direction. 

S
Userlevel 3
Badge

I'm playing one of my playlists. Trouble is the queue doesn't load so I can no longer see what's coming up, alter the order of play etc etc. This is a really bad experience compared to the previous app.

M
Userlevel 3
Badge

We set out to create a more personalized and effortless listening experience with the updated Sonos app. It was rebuilt from the ground up to ensure it could support future innovation in the years to come. For its initial rollout, we focused on how we could answer some of the most common requests from our customers, including increased reliability, performance, and faster access to music.


Many of you have shared valuable feedback on both the improvements that have made your experience better, as well as the areas where we fell short. We are listening to all of your comments and working to address them as quickly as possible. Over the coming weeks, we will reintroduce the below features, while fixing bugs and performance issues. Thank you for your engagement and we look forward to building upon this first step to create a listening experience that meets everyone’s needs.
 

 

Available now

To access these changes, check for updates in the iOS / Android app store to download the latest version of the Sonos app. Make sure your Sonos products are also up to date.

Last updated: May 21, 2024. See release notes.

  • VoiceOver on iOS now properly interacts with individual elements of the Sonos app's home screen - and now adds improved VoiceOver support for allowing for navigating and controlling the Now Playing Screen, System View, Output Selector, Queue, Volume Sliders, and Add Product
  • Improved TalkBack support for the Now Playing Screen, System View, and Add Product
  • Improved Local Music Library playback of folders
  • Adding and editing alarms with the ability to Search for content
  •  

Coming soon

  • Continued improvements to navigation for visually-impaired customers: mid-June
  • Adding to queue and playing next: early June
  • Sleep timer: mid-June
  • Local music library search and playback: mid-June
  • Update WiFi settings: mid-June
  • Snooze alarms: TBD

I hate to be the only one to say this but no one gives a crap about these so called new features, we just want the old ones back that actually worked. We have paid thousands of $$$ for this SONOS system work, which did quite well until this half developed app rolled out. Please fix this piss pour attempt at an upgrade, any consumers are not retained customers..
 

Known issues and workarounds


"Sign in as the System Owner" error while updating products during setup

  • Workaround: No workaround currently available.

 

Our latest update resolves some of the most critical known issues, but know we have more to do. We hear your feedback and are working hard to deliver the experience you expect and deserve.

 

B
Userlevel 1

Why couldn't you make the old version of the app available in the meantime? You screwed it up and won't take responsibility for fixing it. 

B
Userlevel 1

When I started buying their speakers a few years ago I could play all of my music and couldn't have been happier with the system. Then there was an update. Suddenly a lot of songs in my Apple music library couldn't be played because the songs weren't encoded properly. The system just skipped them. I spent a great deal of time with Sonos support and the promised me that they would fix that problem. It never happened and now they release an even more problematic update. I have very little confidence that this will be resolved.

I regret ever buying these four sets of speakers.  Looking for alternatives now.

John Guarr
Userlevel 4
Badge +5

Looking at the calendar, it is now early June. Where is our queue management? If your dev team has been permitted to leave the office in the past 3 weeks they aren’t dedicated to fixing this problem as much as they should be. 

You mention queue management. Excuse me if I don’t know, but is this the reason why I can’t see the songs in any of my playlists or add a song to play?  Because I am running the new Sonos app on my two iPads and don’t see the ability to do this. I can however, do it from my PC controller running Windows 10.  

B
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Sonos will not leave the app without basic playlist functionality long term. It will return before we know it. Only an utter fool would think they would remove it with no intention of reinstating it. 

The absolute idiocy on here is beyond astounding. No-one appears to have the ability to think rationally for themselves.

What about making the decision to release the app? Was that absolute idiocy or do you think that was the right decision? 

J
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

With this global release, Sonos turned every user into a beta tester. I didn’t sign up for this. Obviously, SW QA was curtailed and compromises made (bad ones). The customer should not have to care about roadmaps. That’s for Wall Street and investors.We just want the product to work (hard stop).

Sonos Leadership (@PatrickSpence @NickMillington)...I’m calling you out. The buck stops with you. Stop drinking your own Kool-Aid and take care of your install base...all of them, legacy and new. If it was necessary to deconstruct and rebuild to surpass the old, then it should have been SW QA’d until it was bulletproof before release. There are internal gates with hard criteria that the sw needs to pass. This has been blatantly violated or ‘explained away’. This is unacceptable.

A reputation that took over a decade to build, decimated. You may be a public company now, but seem to have lost sight of the loyal customers and many talented employees that have contributed to the company’s success. Shame on you.

J
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Afterthought...btw, some truth would be good PR.

This sw release is obviously linked to the launch of the Ace headphones.

Therefore, management chose not to postpone the launch (which would impact the sales projection numbers). Headphones ready...sw not. You consciously chose to deal with the fallout thinking all will be forgiven later. Own it.

M
Userlevel 2

Hi Keith. I’m sorry you are having a rough day. 
 

I would like to share that this response makes me feel even angrier, because you have continued to justify your actions and clarify when the things you broke will be fixed. What you did not say is “I am sorry”.

I wrote previously that In order for you to begin to recover from what you have done, if it is even possible, you should start by imagining a similar situation with other daily appliances. Your appliance company calls you and says “we have a small routine update we need to make to your home appliances, we can apply the fix remotely. We’ll come by tonight”…

 

Excellent points and well articulated! This situation is unacceptable, and I expect there will eventually be some accountability.

In the meantime, roll it back. Give the users back everything they had prior the this disaster of an “upgrade.” This was not appropriately vetted, e.g. in Beta testing. I’ve been a Sonos Beta tester and seen a lot of bugs and/or design flaws worked out prior to inflicting them on the entire Sonos community.
 

This was a completely avoidable own-goal; being followed by a bungled response. Please consult a top tier crisis manager and give them the space to help you get Sonos back on track. This is a critical moment for decisive action to be taken after listening to an objective assessment of the situation and the potential dire consequences for a flagship brand such as SONOS. Scott Galloway of Prof G/NYU has some great advice for crisis management. 
 

Scott Galloway provides several key pieces of advice for managing a crisis in a corporation, especially when dealing with an existential threat:

1. **Communicate Regularly**: Leaders should be visible and maintain open lines of communication. This includes making relevant statements and being accessible to both employees and the public. Regular communication helps to maintain trust and transparency during turbulent times [oai_citation:1,Scott Galloway: The Right Way to React to A Crisis - Elevate](https://elevate.ca/blog/the-right-way-to-react-during-a-crisis/) [oai_citation:2,Scott Galloway: Crisis Management - Elevate](https://elevate.ca/events/scott-galloway-crisis-management/).

2. **Acknowledge the Issue**: It's crucial to plainly and transparently acknowledge the existence of the problem. Avoiding or downplaying the issue can erode trust and credibility. Consumers and employees prefer honesty over denial or minimization of the crisis

(https://elevate.ca/events/scott-galloway-crisis-management/).

3. **Overcorrect**: Take bold and decisive actions to address the crisis, even if they seem excessive. Galloway uses the example of Johnson & Johnson’s response to the cyanide crisis in the 1980s as a model for overcorrecting to ensure safety and trust. The idea is that it's better to do too much than too little in a crisis

4. **Set the Right Tone**: Avoid sugarcoating the situation. People want straightforward, sober analysis and a clear understanding of the challenges and the measures being taken. Treat your audience like adults and provide them with the real picture, along with actionable ways they can contribute to the solution [oai_citation:7,YPO | Scott Galloway Shares Leadership Lessons From the Trenches](https://www.ypo.org/2022/11/leadership-lessons-from-the-trenches/) [oai_citation:8,Scott Galloway: Crisis Management - Elevate](https://elevate.ca/events/scott-galloway-crisis-management/).

5. **Maintain a Vision and Consistency**: Leaders should be visionary storytellers, crafting a narrative that is compelling and consistent. This helps in maintaining focus and motivating stakeholders. Galloway emphasizes the importance of having a consistent and believable story, as seen with leaders like Jeff Bezos of Amazon 

By following these principles, leaders can guide their organizations through crises with greater resilience and integrity, potentially redefining their brand and strengthening their position in the long run.

T
Userlevel 4
Badge

With this global release, Sonos turned every user into a beta tester. I didn’t sign up for this. Obviously, SW QA was curtailed and compromises made (bad ones). The customer should not have to care about roadmaps. That’s for Wall Street and investors.We just want the product to work (hard stop).

Sonos Leadership (@PatrickSpence @NickMillington)...I’m calling you out. The buck stops with you. Stop drinking your own Kool-Aid and take care of your install base...all of them, legacy and new. If it was necessary to deconstruct and rebuild to surpass the old, then it should have been SW QA’d until it was bulletproof before release. There are internal gates with hard criteria that the sw needs to pass. This has been blatantly violated or ‘explained away’. This is unacceptable.

A reputation that took over a decade to build, decimated. You may be a public company now, but seem to have lost sight of the loyal customers and many talented employees that have contributed to the company’s success. Shame on you.

Very well stated.

Patrick Spence’s comments in the media were extraordinary when he referred to “us”. 
 

This afternoon I sat down and decided to dive into the iOS app to see how difficult it really was to, say, choose a Spotify playlist, and play it on a specific speaker. That task alone was challenging and far removed from intuitive. Then, once I did have something playing, I tried to view the album that the track originated from. Nope, impossible. Function removed. A core feature enjoyed for decades, removed. 
I’ve given up (for now at least) to access my actual music collection (stored on my NAS and working beautifully for nearly 20 years). I read that my local music library will be accessible again mid June. Gee, thanks, Sonos.

 

 

A
Userlevel 6
Badge +3

I guess they are shifting services towards their servers to control what you are using. Next step: monthly subscription fees, paid premium services etc. And if you want to get rid of ads in your controller app: pay

Keep it simple
P
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

The new Sonos application is equivalent to the new Coke product introduction years ago. How many Sonos customers are more pleased with the new product?

A
Userlevel 6
Badge +3

The new Sonos application is equivalent to the new Coke product introduction years ago. How many Sonos customers are more pleased with the new product?

Buy a coke, pay extra if you want to drink it?

Keep it simple
D
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Not easy anymore to switch from 1 speaker to another, ande certainly not if you switch from phone to IPad or other Smartphone. It is horrible!

It is getting worse by the day. Grouping, switching and volume has gone crazy and the new norm is Expecting the speakers to randomly turn off. Sometimes no access to radio, sometimes no voice capability for the roam or the Sonos ONE, the most expected daily occurrence is not trusting that the system will work… using the UE boom when all else SONOS fails. I tried rolling back and updating. It’s all been a disaster. This forum is intended too help but WHY is it the customers job to fix what they did not break? 

 

This is what I don’t understand with a lot of posts on here. The bolded parts above surely are not app related. Yet many posters in this and other threads report similar issues and are convinced all was fine before the app upgrade. It’s puzzling.

 

With the app update came speaker firmware updates. People are focused on the app, but the entire ecosystem has been thrown away and rewritten from scratch. I think they’ve also stripped some codecs from the playbar 😕

Also, remember the app is the controller; that’s where I suspect the intelligence is (or not)

 

Ye, that was my thoughts too. So, it may be likely we’ll see a number of firmware fixes required too over the coming months, as well as app fixes / restoration of missing functionality. I think it might be a bumpy few months for Sonos support.

 

Quoting myself here, but, literally a minute after I posted the above, I got the below notification in the forum and two days later it’s still going on….. I rather think Sonos is over stretching itself resource-wise trying to execute all these overly ambitious growth plans.

 

 

 

T
Userlevel 3
Badge

What about …

tile view for your own albums

alphabet scroll bar

Grouping rooms often fails

adding new devices nearly always fails on first attempt

Stereo speakers took about 20 goes to get working

library disappears from app

Device update on older port bricks it

Loads of Something went wrong errors with no helpful message like what did go wrong?

siri voice control

adding albums to end of queue

playlist

editing queue

my fingers are sore from typing …

 

 

 

A
Userlevel 4
Badge +3

OK, I got fed up last night of my iPhone and iPad having been updated to version 80.x of the poxy new controller app.

I've had automatic hardware updates disabled for years in my controller so, thankfully, my Sonos devices are still at a firmware level where I can use the last versions of the S2 16.x controller.  I had already rolled back an Android phone to version 16 via APK mirror so could use this for setting sleep timers etc and all the other features I used to be able to use and enjoy.

It is possible to roll back iOS devices but the process is quite involved and probably not for the technically faint hearted.  I'm an IT professional and understand the tools that were used to perform the roll back and the relatively lows risks of using them.  This does not involve jailbreaking your phone or anything else that might be risky/ill-advised.

If your Sonos devices have already been updated beyond this version, I think you will likely be out of luck: -

When Apple deliver an app or an app update to your device, it is digitally signed by them and associated with your own Apple ID.  There are numerous copies of the Sonos S2 version 16 IPA installer for iOS floating around on the internet but these have been associated with other users' Apple IDs and, while you can install them using one of the tools mentioned below, you would need to re-verify the app every week by using the username and password of the Apple ID which obtained the copy.  This is an easy way to roll back if the procedure below seems to be beyond your technical abilities.

The full method of recovering a copy of the last S2 version 16 iOS installer is set out in this post - https://github.com/qnblackcat/How-to-Downgrade-apps-on-AppStore-with-iTunes-and-Charles-Proxy

Basically, you use an old version of Apple iTunes that still supports downloading and managing apps inside iTunes (I used 12.6.5 as per the article).  You also use a piece of SSL proxy inspection software (Charles Proxy) to "man in the middle" and decrypt the network traffic between your version of iTunes and Apple and to replay the request for the download of the latest version of the Sonos controller app that is published in the Apple App Store.

The neat bit about the SSL interception/inspection software is the ability to record/edit and replay a request.  The "download latest Sonos app" request is replayed after editing the request to ask Apple to give you your very own signed copy of the S2 version 16 controller app.  It's a pukka copy, provided by Apple and associated to the Apple ID that you are signed into iTunes with.

Once the IPA file has been downloaded to the computer, you can use other tools (I used the demo version of iMazing) to remove the version 80.x Sonos app from my i-devices and install my own signed copy of the 16.x app using the IPA file kindly provided to me by Apple.

As far as I'm aware, this process can only be done on a Windows computer. The basic process is: -

Uninstall any copy of iTunes you have currently installed and install version 12.6.5.3 from the link in the article above.  If you get an error about the library version, just delete/rename the existing library.itl file as per the instructions.
If you have a spare Windows device that's never had iTunes installed, even better as there will be no newer version of an iTunes library already on it so, no risk of losing/corrupting any iTunes library you may have already curated.
Install the Charles Proxy software as per the article above - it's a fully functioning 30 day demo.
Follow the remaining instructions carefully from the article above.
To save research time, the build number of the Apple Sonos version 16.1 app you want Apple to provide you with is 864228318.
When you have successfully downloaded your own signed copy of the Sonos S2 version 16.1 installer, you can use the demo version of iMazing to install it on your devices assuming that they are using the same Apple ID used to pull the old version via iTunes.
As usual, I'm not taking any responsibility for supporting anyone who follows this process nor any consequences that might flow from you doing it.  Again, I repeat, if you are not comfortable with the skills needed to follow this process, you're probably better off waiting for Sonos to fix their app.
Do check out the Sonos guidance at https://en.community.sonos.com/owners-cafe-228997/player-controller-versions-why-update-6894905 to see their self imposed limitations on what you can and can't do with older speaker firmware and controller versions.
If you have already completed Sonos device firmware updates beyond 78.1-52020, I think you'll be out of luck trying to use the S2 version 16.1 app in any event.

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