macOS controller and Apple Silicon

Anticipating the demise of the Mac app, I just tried the web interface and find it very slow and clunky. 

Sonos not bothering to update their app to Apple Silicon is just lazy and insulting to Mac owners, many of whom, like me were early Sonos adopters. 

I did a quick investigation, and discovered that the Sonos Mac app is basically old junk code using deprecated Carbon APIs and very early versions of Cocoa going back decades. If Sonos had kept the app up to date, it would be a simple matter to recode for Apple Silicon. As it is, it will probably never happen. 

This is a very bad reflection on Sonos's software management and priorities, but as we've seen with the iOS app, they've basically fucked up software multiple times and probably will do again. 

Such a shame, as overall I'm very impressed with the sound quality from my various Sonos speakers and systems. 

This works very well to give you a quick alternative to get to the Sonos controller on the web. It's still the same sluggish web app with invisible volume controls, but at least it's an easy way to get there. 

A Quick Alternative on Mac
If you want a native-feeling experience without relying on the aging, emulated Intel app, you can turn their web player into a standalone app:

1. Open Sonos controller in Safari.
2. Click File in the Mac menu bar.
3. Select Add to Dock.

This creates a lightweight, Apple Silicon-native progressive web app (PWA) that runs independently of your browser and skips Rosetta entirely.

play.sonos.com looks fine on my Mac’s including Volume Sliders The screenshot is captured from my Mac Studio Display connected to MacMini_M4 running macOS Tahoe 26.5.1. 

Thanks AJ. I am on 26.6 b1 not sure if that is why. I’ll keep experimenting UPDATE sorted, it was an extension called darker that keeps Safari in Dark Mode in this case. It was affecting the volume sliders and weirdly nothing else.  Looks much better with it turned off 🤣

Glad you figured out the appearance issue.

FYI, for future reference Sonos Tech Support doesn’t offer support for OS beta’s of any type. That’s also information that we in the community (although we are not Sonos Tech Support) need to know as well. We could spend a lot of time offering solutions that normally work but not on a beta.

Here’s my tip… I use Brave Browser… Go to Sonos Web Player… log in… let Brave create an App and then you have a web app…  very easy and works a treat

does the web version work on chrome if it gets into the dreaded “can’t talk to local devices” state? as far as I and the web understand, it’s a chrome bug/limitation on mac that has no easy work around.

As far I know, the web controller running in your browser makes no local network connections. play.sonos.com communicates over the internet with your speakers/sonos devices.

really - what do the speakers connect to on the internet to make that work? I don’t think that’s right. my NAS is not on the internet, but the speakers can talk to it.

The speakers are connected to sonos’ cloud infrastructure. The web controller talks to your speakers over the internet. If the queue has songs from your local Music Library on your NAS, then your speaker plays songs from your NAS over your local network, like always.

Local Music Library playing is not something the web controller is very good at. The Music Library listing in the web controller is frustratingly slow and has no album art, just as an example.