Why is it not possible to play directly from my Android phone anymore

This drives me nuts! Why would I ever again buy Sonos products when they remove essential features like this? I don’t subscribe to a music streaming service, and the Sonos devices I have (Arc and Sonos Ones) don’t have bluetooth. The only solutions offered are to subscribe to streaming or invest in NAS - so spend more money to replace the storage my phone does just fine. Effectively Sonos has just decided to deny me access to my music. Thanks!

Yawn. This again. It’s  been raised and answered in so many other threads. And now another…

yes. THIS again. Because people are PISSED.

I will never buy another sonos product. this makes ~$750.00 USD of equipment useless.

Completely agree with the above angry comments.  The Sonos app has always been known as one of the biggest bag of b******* ever programmed and now they have tampered with it even further to make it impossible to play the songs I own from the phone that I own to the speakers that I own.  I have spent literally thousands on this piece of * over fifteen years and they cannot resist every opportunity to ruin people’s experiences with they system.

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

Agreed, you should definitely complain to Google, who is forcing this alteration with the changes they’re making to the Android OS. 

Completely agree. Its 90% of my use of SONOS and why we bought it in the first place. I feel robbed.

But why is everyone blaming Sonos when, by all accounts, it’s Google that has discontinued a feature that Sonos was making use of? Or are you agreeing you should/will/have complained to Google? 

Everyone is blaming SONOS because it is their fault.

SONOS could have made it work. But instead the company just puts a bot on here to automatically respond to every complaint about what SONOS has done by just blaming Google. I will happily accept that Google is much more evil than SONOS, but in this case  Google is just being used as a scapegoat. SONOS could and should make this work

Ahh, inside information: you work for Sonos. Hence you know “SONOS could have made it work”. All is explained now. 

You’re welcome. 🙂

I can’t believe they removed this feature.  I store music on my phone, and use this feature for DJ’ing at parties where Sonos systems are already installed.  WTF?  I see I am not the only person mad about this. 

There are various ways to handle this. Do any of the SONOS players support Line-In? If so, there are Bluetooth to analog audio converters.

Deal with it..why even bother responding if it bothers you so much…yawn 

That’s the fun of these forums: someone posts, someone responds, and so on it goes. 

Does anyone know if I downloaded an old version of S2 I would regain functionality?  I presume it wouldn’t work as the hardware is updated to the later version.

The firmware on the devices is what has changed this - the app is just a remote to the devices.

And when Android updates their OS, even devices with older Sonos OS’s, this feature will stop working. It’s the Google/Android OS that is forcing this change. Just like when Apple changed iOS and broke ‘on this device’ playback from all iOS devices. 

You could, I suppose, never update either your old Sonos software and your Android software, and keep both of them unchanged in perpetuity.

I don’t work for Sonos but agree that it is Google who is forcing this change.  Now the only option to play music from your device is to upload it to a cloud storage service that supports Sonos, such as iBroadcast, Apple Music, Deezer, Plex, and YouTube Music. From these services you can import your music to Sonos.  YouTube Music and iBroadcast are free.  However, YouTube Music (Google) will only import 999 songs to the Sonos Queue, making it useless to those who have a larger music library.  I don’t know if iBroadcast limits imports to Sonos, but it imported my entire library (2730 songs) to Sonos and I am, once again, playing my music through Sonos. 

My hope is that Sonos works with Google to fix the issue with limited imports, and that it partners with these needed services to offer free subscriptions to its users.   

I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’d assume Sonos tried to work with Apple, several years ago when Apple shut off this feature that Sonos was working, to no avail. Those of us who use iOS have been without this ‘feature’ since August of 2019. It was also forced by a change to the iOS operating system, evidently nothing that Sonos could do. 

It’s one option, not the only option.  Refer to the original announcement thread, linked in this thread, for other options.

Agree, I use iPhone, there isn’t a more comfortable app than the native Apple Music app using Airplay, the Apple Music interface in the Sonos app is horrible, pretty slow, I try to search something and appear very few    results, and the Apple Music  browsing tab   is limited to my library and the stations.
Don’t come out that AirPlay will be deleted too because  I’m gonna swoon, bought my Sonos Roam for $250 this is getting unreliable, and unreliable even more                

Apple provides the UI and other features for the Sonos app……

I think the Sonos App Apple Music search interface and results screen are fine - it’s no worse than the Apple Music App and there’s a tab to search the user local uploaded iCloud library too.

It looks pretty good to me on the iPad (See below example search result for Genesis)…