Apple TV App

I too thought about writing TVONOS to work on Apple devices (mainly TV as that is what TVONOS’s main target is), but only briefly as it would require a significant amount of re-write work and testing. Then there is the fact of getting something to test it on and the development environment costs (other than hacky VMs I believe you still need a Mac) and the annual £79 fee for apps that really would never cover your costs. (Not looking at making a profit, but it would cost a fair bit to get going and I feel that every year I’d be paying for others to use the app)

Simple solution to get an iOS App on your TV screen, ‘Mirror Screen’, just swipe down from top right to get to Control Centre, and mirror your iPhone/IPad screen to the Apple TV, then you have the official Sonos App or 3rd party Sonos App on your TV screen.

You don't even need an Apple TV, LG TVs will natively support Mirror Screen (Im sure others do), and have the added advantage you can overlay the iOS screen on top of the video source, eg you can be watching TV, and have the Sonos App to the right side, just by pressing blue button on LG remote.

Edit: This Link suggests in EU there are 101M iOS active App Store users, 23M iPadOS App Store, and 1M tvOS App Store users in EU in 2023. Anyone looking at ‘porting’ somethoing from iOS to tvOS would have to take this limited tvOS market into account, ie less than 1% tvOS vs iOS active App Store users.

As of now, Sonos doesn’t offer a dedicated Apple TV app, and there hasn’t been any official indication that one is in development. Apple TV is mainly treated as an AirPlay source rather than a full Sonos control surface. myinfo

Most people still manage Sonos through the iOS/iPadOS app and use AirPlay from Apple TV when needed. Totally agree though it would be great to have a native Apple TV Sonos app.

It’s hard enough controlling Sonos from the official iOS/iPad OS apps thanks to the obsession with swiping in every direction. I dread to think how clunky a TV OS app would end up being!

I can sort of see a use case for a Sonos ‘now playing’ app, which shows the currently playing track and next few songs in the queue on a TV, and for it to maybe let you skip to the next track, but it would have huge potential for screen burn on OLEDs as it would be quite static. 

 I agreed that the UI would need some significant changes for it to be user friendly on a bigger screem with mostly remote arrow buttons for navigation  

I think another issue is that for the majority of cases, the user would want to control the speakers in the same room, likely connected to as the well, the TV.  It would useless for TV sources, obviously.  For many streaming sources, a direct TV app is already available to use, playing with the TV source. You might have the advantage of sound quality, and switching between TV app and device app at will, but not much else.  

Some other cons would be the remote volume buttons, as intuitively you would hope to control the volume of whatever room the Sonos app is focused on currently, but it would still control the TV volume (or Sonos speaker connected to TV).  The other issue is that there would be an expectation that the TV app and device app are in sync, which may not be a big deal to accomplish, but not really an expectation with multiple device controllers.

All that said, if Sonos does ever revive their video streaming device project, I would expect that would have whole home audio controller built in.  I would also expect a remote would have dedicated buttoms for common Sonos functions to make the UI easier to navigate, or control without taking away from whatever content you’re watching.

I saw on the App Store an app called Sonow, not tried it yet - seems promising though.

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

As of now, Sonos does not provide a native app for Apple TV, and there hasn’t been any clear indication that one is in development. Most users continue to rely on the Sonos app available on iPhone or iPad to control their system, or they use alternatives like AirPlay to stream audio.

While a dedicated Apple TV app would certainly be convenient, especially for a living room setup, current functionality is still centered around mobile devices rather than TV-based control.

While a basic display-current-song app is simple enough, it’ going to be hard to do a full-function Sonos app controlled by a remote.

I was pretty pleased with how my app for Xbox works with a controller as the input device, but an Apple TV has even less buttons than an Xbox controller.