Sounds like a bug - Recently Played is a cloud feature, and it is *extremely* fussy about how items are played to make them playable from that container. (I know this as my apps have had trouble with this in the past). However, for the life of me I can’t think what difference you playing something would be from your wife playing something, at least on the “old” APIs. However, the mobile apps use the “new” LAN apis, so who knows.

Suggestion: try the desktop app, each of you, and see if that works better. Although the Desktop apps can’t display Recently Played, items started with it will still show up in that list. If Desktop works fine and mobile doesn’t then its another mobile app regression.

It’s possible that this is a “feature”. I can imagine some users would want their Favorites and/or Recently Played to be separate from other users (each using their own controller). Parents/kids would be one example.

It doesn’t appear they are separated per controller if he can see his wife’s selections and vice versa. The problem is if they select each other’s Recently Played items they don’t play from their own respective controlller.

Maybe restarting a controller will load the “other” Favorites.

Being a computer scientist, my first guess was some version incompatibility between the apps running on the two phones (which would be a “schoolboy error”).   

I checked the versions of the sonos app on the two phones and they are indeed different - which is strange because my phone is set to manual app update and is on a slightly more recent version of the app than my wife’s phone that is on auto update (and claims the app is up to date)  I can’t actually find a way to force them to the same version.

iAside: I’m not even sure what ‘controller’ means here -  or how users / cloud logins relate to ‘controllers’.   We have two phones that we use to control sonos, and visitors can also apparently play things on our system.  But the sonos app seems to assume that there is one cloud account for my system that both phones -- and my laptop -- must share.  Our phones work, and see the same recently played list, whether they are ‘logged in’ or not.   This is super confusing to me -- where does the state live? ]   

​@pbar - There is a slight difference in app versions between iOS and Android, so that could explain the difference you see?!

https://support.sonos.com/en-gb/article/release-notes-sonos-app-updates

”controller” simply just refers to the device (mobile/pc/mac) which is running the Sonos app.

All the Sonos system info, favourites, playlists etc are stored on the Sonos devices so in that respect there is one overall system that any connected “controller” sees.

We both have recent model iphones, so I’d have assumed they would be on the same version.  Certainly *compatible* versions.  They are clearly showing different revisions and no obvious way to update (I expect my wife’s phone on auto update hasn’t been offerered the most recent app version by Apple since they stagger rollouts to smooth out the load on their update servers)

But -- datastructures and APIs that need to interoperate reliably across updates and different platforms/devices are typically carefully designed so they can be extended without breaking backwards compatibility.  (at the very least you need to be able to tell that things are running incompatible versions and ask the user to upgrade).  This is the think I mentioned as being a ‘schoolboy error’ for a software engineer.