The new design is not user-friendly:
- To play a radio station, I have to 1) click on Sonos Favorites, 2) click on Stations: View All (pointless), 3) scroll through a bunch of large unalphabetized images to find my station (hassle), 4) click on my station, 5) (and then the kicker) still have to click on Play! I should be able to just 1) click on a tab or Sonos Favorites and get an alphabetized view of the small icons (so one small scroll will show all of them), and 2) click on the station to make it play -- DONE. The info for the station should be a 3rd click. It makes no sense station info would take priority over play and cause an extra click EVERY TIME you play the station. All of this makes it incredibly labor intensive to flip through stations.
- Recently Added for Favorites should be something I can turn off, minimize, or move out of sight. I have it on the Home page already, and yet it’s right on top of all my stations every time?
- I should be able to just stay on my Sonos Favorites page, or on my Music Library, or on the main page for any pinned item.
- It’s much more visually appealling to have the home page be the info and image for the source you are playing with all the controls, and then just have the tabs at the bottom for Stations, Sources, Search, System Settings, and any pinned or desired item, like podcasts/shows.
The new app lacks major functionality the old app had:
- No information shown for sources, like Radio Stations, that are playing (I haven’t tested my Music Library or all sources or system functionality yet, but I have tested Sonos, TuneIn, and Pandora Stations, as well as some Airplay sources).
- Sonos Favorites stations are not alphabetized, making it a pain to find a station.
- AirPlay drops out unexpectedly and wavers with some sources.
- AirPlay volume does not work properly and can cause the station to drop out or get stuck on an undesirable volume.
- AirPlay sources get overridden by web adds when using my phone, even though I have it set not to (and this was never a problem with the old app).
- TruePlay tuning is not working.
- All Podcast Classics podcasts/Shows have vanished and read “No longer available” without any explanation.
- Pocket Casts (which I started to get around this issue) does not play or sync.
- Many small features we had in the vastly superior gold version of the app are missing. I could go on.
It appears the app redesign was not well thought out for users nor tested for functionality, and was implemented way before it was ready in order to make addressing bug fixes easier on the back end. This is really a burden for us users and with so many design and functionality issues, makes us wonder about our future with Sonos. I used to love my Sonos and say it was one of the best purchases I ever made. I no longer feel that way… at all. The #1 thing you could do that would impress us users, is if you rolled back to the gold version of the app, implemented all functionality into the new app and tested everything, and improved the design for user-friendliness before releasing.
Additionally, not only was there no warning about any of these issues from the app redesign team, there is little to no information on these items from them. The forum is also hard to navigate. There is no area for My Open Topics, all topics do not appear in search results, topics in search results appear in any order (an item from 3 years ago appears right next to one from two days ago… ), and the forum is needlessly complex (just have an area for each product and a general area for individual services, feedback, and items that work across products, like voice control, you can point to with pinned topics from the product threads).