Ive just updated to the new S2 app and wanted to share some of my thoughts and hope to hear other peoples opinions since updating.
Positives:
- Sound quality seems to of improved following the update, I’ve tested home cinema and music and there seems to be an improvement in clarity, seems richer. I don’t know if this is my ears playing tricks on me but I’m as happy as ever with the excellent sound quality.
- App opening, search and general usability/navigation seems faster.
- Room groups is a good feature and welcomed although I would love to see this working with Alexa so I can summon a group change via voice! Is this coming?
Not so Positives:
- The update process is very cumbersome and should be completely automated, instead your community is left faffing about trying to work out what order to update things. I was stuck being told my system wasn’t compatible for s2 for some time with no clear instruction of what to do to update!
- All the hype and the chance to reinvent the UI and excite their loyal community and the app is practically the same with only minor tweaks...we were all so excited for a new and shiny Sonos app!
- The new colour scheme is hard on the eyes, why grey with a white menu bar? It all just blends together and looks so dated!
- No Dark mode….seriously? Give users the option, I assume you feel this will mess with your new colour scheme, personally I think it’s just lazy...design something that works light and dark. The now playing screen is better and clearer with the black menu bar and a coloured background drawn from the album art.
- The new mini now playing bar looks messy. When you are scrolling through albums they can be seen either side of the mini now playing bar now you have this new floating look and it just looks too busy, especially with the light grey dark grey white colour scheme, it all just blends together.
- Still no Spotify genre browsing - many of your Spotify community customers want the ability to browse Spotify genres back and were hoping for this functionality restored with this update. Instead when browsing Spotify through your app we are presented with our most listened to genres but with no options to browse all genres unless you exit your app and browse directly though the Spotify app. This has made music discovery from within your app pretty much obsolescent!
- What is with the new icon colour??? Very strange colour choice, and the colour isn’t replicated anywhere within your new app colour scheme other than the splash screen? This just doesn’t make sense? I would of thought you would at least inject it here and there within your app to keep some consistency in your design language….baffled?
Hopefully this is the first update of many and more tweaking will come over the coming months based on your users feedback but I won’t hold my breath based on previous major updates.
