I'll add myself to the list of people requesting this very useful feature be reinstated. 

Thanks 

For a while SONOS was using a hack on Apple phone/pad to provide the Lock Screen control. Apple has made it clear that any application using this sort of hack will be dropped from the App Store.

Google has a similar policy for Android.

So why do all of my other music apps have controls on the lock screen then?

 Because the Sonos app is a remote,  not a music app.

Apple rules state that you cannot reassign the functionality of the lock screen and hard button controls.  They can only be used to control audio playing on or through the phone.  Since Sonos does not play through the phone (in fact, they hacked in a silent file playing in the background to get around the rule), Apple told them to cease using the hack or risk being banned from the app store. So until Apple relaxes its rules, there’s nothing Sonos can do. 

Yeah but this topic is not about the iPhone app, is it? So any discussion on why any app can or can’t have certain features on Apple devices is not of interest to this topic. If this would be the same on Android I guess this would be clearly stated by Sonos as the reason to removing this feature. Until then this is nothing but laziness from the product team. Maybe they expect all new audience to just press play on a radio station then leave it running. Thus no need for any extensive interaction with the playback 

Fortunately Spotify Connect is now working for me again (no thanks to Sonos or Spotify), so I am not limited to using the crap Sonos App anymore.

Since Sonos has never admitted the actual reason why the Apple lock controls were taken away (besides a cryptic “We aren’t blaming anyone. but you can read between the lines” wishy washy PR statement), I highly doubt they are going to “clearly state” anything about Google.  Sonos simply doesn’t throw the partners it depends on to distribute their app under the bus. 

Well this is once again nothing but laziness and bad customer management. No one is getting thrown under the bus. If the mobile companies have made a certain change then that is up to them, for their reasons. It would be very simple to shut all of these threads down with a “Sorry guys, this is out of hands, we cannot deliver this feature until Apple makes changes to their policies.” end of story.

Well anyway, the credibility of Sonos is gone for me. I have been a Sonos owner for many years, but can no longer recommend the system to friends or family that would ask. Everyone most surely have a feature they miss in the new app. But to me the missing lock screen and notification controls, the lack of limited Spotify playlists and the overall sluggish loading in the app is more than enough. As for the new hardware, the entry level speaker is now way too expensive and there are other options on the market. I will not invest in any more hardware in the near future 

As noted above the SONOS App does not play music through the phone/pad. The SONOS APP simply remote controls the SONOS system to directly access the music source. Once music starts to play through the SONOS system the SONOS App can be shut down or removed from the phone/pad and the music will continue. In the Apple ecosystem an App MUST actually be playing the music before Lock Screen controls are available. The hack that SONOS once used is considered to be a security issue by Apple and Google.

If you have an App that directly plays the music on the phone/pad, AirPlay or (on newer SONOS models)  Bluetooth can be used to send that music to SONOS and the Lock Screen controls will be available to the App that is playing the music. Alexa could also be used instead of the Lock Screen controls.

Spotify connect could also be considered a remote since the music is not playing on the phone. The music service creates a connection from the speaker to the server and the mobile device is nothing more than a remote. The mobile device can be turned off and any other device on the same network can connect and act as a remote AND control the music from the lock screen 

And once again. I am only debating Android here.

This thread is about Android, as is my question. 

The only practical difference is that Android cannot use AirPlay.

So can we stop talking about Apple in this thread please? It's confusing matters. 

Me too...

Really missing the controls on lock screen. Was very useful as your don't have to open the app.

If it wasn't broken why remove it?

Because the OS manufacturer doesn’t allow it and threatened to remove the app from the Google Play Store if Sonos didn’t remove it

Nah. The Tesla app on android lives as a permanent notification and has shortcuts to unlock, open the trunk etc. Sonos could do something similar to play/pause and skip at least, even if it has to show up as text.

That's not the reason. Not sure what is though 

Really missing the controls on lock screen. Was very useful as your don't have to open the app.

 

If it wasn't broken why remove it?

 

Because the OS manufacturer doesn’t allow it and threatened to remove the app from the Google Play Store if Sonos didn’t remove it

Nah. The Tesla app on android lives as a permanent notification and has shortcuts to unlock, open the trunk etc. Sonos could do something similar to play/pause and skip at least, even if it has to show up as text.

That's not the reason. Not sure what is though 

 

Not even close to the same thing.

Really missing the controls on lock screen. Was very useful as your don't have to open the app.

 

If it wasn't broken why remove it?

 

Because the OS manufacturer doesn’t allow it and threatened to remove the app from the Google Play Store if Sonos didn’t remove it

Nah. The Tesla app on android lives as a permanent notification and has shortcuts to unlock, open the trunk etc. Sonos could do something similar to play/pause and skip at least, even if it has to show up as text.

That's not the reason. Not sure what is though 

 

 

Not even close to the same thing.

Please elaborate. I'm genuinely curious. It felt pretty similar UX to me (remote control of a device over any air interface) so not sure what I missed.

It’s not so much the widgets as the lock screen FF, Play, REW controls and the volume hard buttons.  The OS makers require those to be used for media players only, i.e. apps which play the media through the app.  The Sonos app is not a media player, it is a controller.  The media is streamed directly to the hardware, it doesn’t pass through the app, so the lock screen and hard button controls cannot be used.

For iOS, Sonos at one time used a hack to get around this limit, playing a silent file in the background to fool iOS into thinking it was a media player, but Apple got wise to it and sent a cease and desist.  Not sure what the background is for Android, but I imagine it is something similar. 

I get that but you’re not addressing how the Tesla example is irrelevant then. Half the thread here is that Sonos isn’t responsible, Apple is and so “maybe” android also is.

Clearly Android has no issue with Tesla allowing remote controls in a notification panel for doors unlocking, so how different would it be for sonos to use similar UX to enable remote controls? It would not be about tricking the OS into thinking it is a media player, on the contrary it would be transparently NOT being one, and pushing shortcuts to actions sent to the controller. 

Remote controls for door locking are not anything like the remote controls for a media player.  One is a unique function for that particular app, the others are standard functions present in every media player app made (and there are thousands).  That is how they are different (I can’t believe I actually had to explain that).

And once again, I’m not talking about the notifications thing.  My post was expressly about the lock screen controls and hard buttons.  I know nothing about the rules on notification screens.

Don't worry you didn't have to explain the difference between play/pause and unlocking doors. All I see is buttons triggering api calls to a server that will remotely either unlock doors, or pause playing on a sonos speaker, and send back the new state. I never suggested this to be the same function, only similar implementation. In the previous sonos all the lock screen control setting was nested inside the notifications settings of the Sonos app, that's why I assumed they were pretty much the same thing (before you say "no they're not": I mean in terms of implementation, not philosophical function).

Let's not assume we are all talking to idiots, and rather try to put our brains together to figure out how this could be implemented if we want sonos to try. Might be wishful thinking, but what's the point of these forums anyway? (Besides belittling each other so we can feel were right). "It's not even close to the same thing" without further explanation felt a bit dismissive in that regard.

I’m quite sure Sonos knows far more about their own implementation than any of us, not to mention the OS rules they need to adhere to.  They don’t need us to think for them.  As a developer myself, some of the biggest laughs I’ve gotten in my 35+ years in the business have been from people who don’t know my job telling me how something can or should be done.