If other music players can better tolerate your network configuration, I suggest that you stay with them. If you can describe your network in detail, we can suggest some more functional network configurations.

Are you from Sonos? If you are, my simple answer to your suggestion is: no. You need to fix the App. Why do you refuse to fix the App? There is no reason why it keeps losing connection with the network, I am sorry. I use Community Fibre here in London, with a very simple standard set-up. You need to support it. Your refusal to admit or correct the issues is even more frustrating than the issues themselves. 

Please escalate internally.

You are on a User to User forum, with a very light presence from Sonos Staff and all of them here officially have that clearly shown on the or profile name.

The Sonos App doesn’t carry your music, the players do, while the App just sends them commands.

Oh, and it is almost always your network. It is very rarely the network you connect to so London Fiber is more than likely innocent.

Sonos and its (remote) controller App work fine for the Wife and I and everything is really stable on our LAN subnet. So my thoughts are it’s likely your controller device and/or your network.

If the App loses connection to your Sonos devices it’s probably an SSDP (part of the UPnP protocol) multicast ‘device discovery issue. Maybe explore that possibility with your network provider and check your local controller device for things that may interrupt the device discovery packets, such as VPN clients, security software, mobile data interruptions and background tasks. 

The Sonos software is the least-likely cause of the issue here, otherwise it would not work for my Home setup, or other family members and our friends …and they do not have any connection-loss issues either. 

You need to look local to likely find the answer to your Sonos issue.

We are mostly volunteers. SONOS employees are clearly labeled.

At one point I had major issues with my SONOS system. The cause turned out to be a neighbor’s cordless phone system, known to trash the wireless environment. After adjusting a player’s physical location in order to avoid the phone base station, along with proper configuration of my network, my issues were resolved. That was in 2005. If I had system disfunction such as you describe, I would not be here.

I’m not familiar with Community Fiber. Maybe another user can help with some configuration suggestions.

We all have our idea of how a “proper” App should interact with the user. Millions of people think that Apple has the best user interface. I’m not one of those millions. If Apple “fixed” things in order to satisfy me, millions would be angry. I do have some Apple experience because I must use an iPad for work functions.

Lots of toys being tossed from the pram, not much in calls for help.  I'll pass.

In your original post you claim to have “raised this issue multiple times” yet your user profile only shows activity in this thread.

You claim that “the Sonos App is badly coded”. How did you access the code itself, to reach this opinion? 

If the app is so bad that “IT DOES NOT WORK”, why aren’t there thousands of users complaining? 

Sure, the app could be improved. But if you mean “I’m having problems with my system” and the symptom is poor connection with app and speakers, your network is the likely place to look first, as has been suggested in other replies above.

Why not try that route first? It has been the solution to unreliable connections for many other users - including me. I was sceptical that my network was at fault, but a flush of the system (power down, then a phased restart of devices) and then allocating ip addresses to my speakers has fixed things for me. 

Did you find any way to use it smoothly? or it’s still crashing?

Who are you asking? My system has been stable and reliable for years. 

The app is total junk! 

Without specific issues, it’s hard to take your comments with any seriousness. What makes it ‘total junk’ to you? My experience has been like @nik9669a , with zero concerns for years and years. 

Obviously a number of contributors have experienced no issues and that’s great to hear.  I have had many years of issues with the Sonos app/system connectivity and wish (despite the unchallenged quality of the end devices) that I never started using the kit (15+ years back).  I have become accustomed to having to variously reboot the devices, my phone, my router in varied sequences to get running again.  This is not as enjoyable as listening to music.  There was a period (several weeks) where (due to some incompatibility with a then new BT dual frequency router) I was completely unable to connect to one part of my network.

Mainly I lose devices on opening the app.  Often it only needs 15 min or so to find them all so maybe that’s not so bad.  My (arc connected) Beam can drop repeatedly in and out every few minutes which adds no end to the viewing experience!

I have over the years tried most of the fault finding recommended.  I can’t hardwire a device to my router (that’s why I bought a wireless system in the first place!).  

I access another 2 household set ups.  One has a single Play and (hopefully unsurprisingly) no issues.  The other has 3 devices and usually only loses one infrequently (few times a month).  Neither have a BT router.

When my system is fine (and this can be for extended periods of up to one or two weeks) it’s great.  Nevertheless I agree completely with fxsmeets’ original comments.  Unlike fxsmeets I now have no expectation this will be fixed since there is no acceptance that there is a problem.  Once again, nice to hear so many people have no issues!

I agree. But this forum is mostly Sonos fan boys so don’t try complaining here.
 

I have a Sonos speaker in every room, and have had Sonos around 10 years. Lately I’m fed up with the app. It can never find the speakers or it won’t do anything until you run yet another update or it just simply takes forever to open. And it’s not my wifi or anything else that the fanboys like to blame because when the app can’t find the speakers and refuses to do anything, I can still control my music/Sonos through my 3rd party home automation app. So yeah. The app is a waste of time. 

After my dismal Roam experience I have already decided to chuck my Sonos system next year and go back to a wired, non-cloud, non-updating system next year. 

See you in 4 months!

I Have 2 Play 1’s in my den for years running from an S1 app without problems.

Just bought 2 Era 300’s and a sub mini and got the (I assume) S2 app on my Android 13 phone.

I really wish I hadn’t bothered!

Reading the foregoing however, am I to understand that if I have the speakers connected to the mains. then switch the app on on the phone, it will eventually find them?

By the way, I did contact Sonos and was told that the problem was caused by my sky router!

Makes sense. There are a lot of routers that often fail to route correctly. Sky has a poor reputation in this area, and are infamous for the “trash wifi packets” issue many years ago.

If Sky is your ISP then buy a decent router and make sure all your devices use that and not the Sky connection.

Thank you for that. Perhaps you could advise a suitable router/routers. This is not my area of expertise.

Presumably a non sky router wont affect my Sky Q  setup?

Power without control is a no brainer. The app is atrocious. Why? 99 times out of 100 sonos playlists are invisible, the lag before before connecting is now a constant, and is getting worse. In the UK we have the horizon scandal, where Fujitsu and Royal Mail doubled down on the lie, that the horizon system installed was bug free and any fault lay with the poor submasters. Sound familiar? 

Sure sounds like a local network issue you’re experiencing, but there just isn’t enough detail in your rant to be certain. 

What nonsense.  Sorry to shout at you , but THE SONOS APP IS JUST A REMOTE CONTROL.  If just sends commands.  If there is lagging, it HAS to be you network.  It CANNOT be the app.  Your choices are:

1. Continue to believe ill informed rubbish
2. Allow some of the helpful and knowledgeable users on this forum to help you resolve your problems

Do you want to humour us by providing a detailed description of your network set up?

Yes, it is akin to putting a big wall between your TV and your infra-red remote, and blaming the TV/remote manufacturer because the remote doesn’t work. 

Hells teeth!!!!!!!

As a matter of interest, I have tried leaving the Sotify app open over the last couple of days and find that when I switch my phone on, the living room (Sonos) immediately appears in the list of devices.

Hopefully its all systems go now.

I also wear a garlic necklace!!!!

Exactly

Or perhaps not…

The discovery of the Sonos products by the Sonos controller App is a slightly complex area to explore, but briefly… 

SSDP (the UPnP simple service discovery protocol) is used to initially discover the Sonos players and is done via multicasting via UDP to 239.255.255.250:1900 and, for good measure, broadcasting to 255.255.255.255:1900. 

Both the Sonos players and controllers must share the same network subnet. However if the Sonos devices are connecting to multiple access points, the recommendations (from myself) are that they be set to the same WiFi channel and channel-width. This is for optimum performance particularly in groups and for some reason with some (not all) mesh-based WiFi systems, it appears some will work okay with Sonos, but others may not, particularly if the satellites/AP’s are perhaps auto-selecting their own WiFi channels. I’ve seen some people report issues with Google ‘nest’ mesh WiFi, for example, although others will occasionally say it works for their ‘small’ Sonos setup.

What is certainly not supported though by Sonos, are wireless range extenders, as some can mangle device MAC addresses and EoP (powerline) adapters.. so if you are using those type of wireless access points, to extend the wireless network coverage, then that may cause such intermittent device discovery issues by the Sonos Controller App.

Just to add aswell, it can sometimes be Apps/software running on the mobile device that interfere with ‘device discovery’ Examples to perhaps consider are…

• VPN Client 
• Firewall software
• Antivirus software
• WiFi Calling/Dial assist
• Private network address (MAC address spoofing)
• Mobile data enabled for the Sonos App