New app update horrible, giving a leg up to the competitors

I feel your pain! I downloaded SonosPad and it's miles head of th new Sonos app....

Yes the new app is really terrible - I wish there was a way to go back to version 7.4.

Yeah it's frustrating how fiddly it is now. I finally got my significant other to love and use it on a daily basis. I just have to make sure she doesn't upgrade the app on her phone.

I am not here to defend the changes, but to pick up the OP's point about selecting a room and playing music....

Swipe down the Now Playing screen, tap rooms button if necessary, double tap required room, hit play. Takes me about a second. Is that really so demanding and difficult? Is that really ruined? I cannot put it anything like as strongly.

I am not here to defend the changes, but to pick up the OP's point about selecting a room and playing music....

Swipe down the Now Playing screen, tap rooms button if necessary, double tap required room, hit play. Takes me about a second. Is that really so demanding and difficult? Is that really ruined? I cannot put it anything like as strongly.

I'm happy that you can easily navigate it, but I don't think you caught my point. If you have the muscle memory to work the new app then great. What I'm saying is I had a hard time figuring out the new UI, and after using it for most of today I still couldn't get used it. I still think the app is counter intuitive. Now you have to go into seperate menus to find favorites etc.

MY POINT is that the Sonos app was the best app out there in form of responsiveness and ease of use, with everything on the same page and an easy search box. You want to put on music and you want it to be an effortless FAST task. Having 4 BIG icons with a random playlist or album on my home screen (like some Spotify for people with visual impairment), which i will never use, doesn't do me any good. Now the app is almost as bad as the Heos app which is primarily the reason why we went with Sonos in our house. We used to have Heos, but the Heos app was so poor in speed, buggy, and too clumsy to find stuff, so the speakers were almost never used by anyone. So I figured I don't care if the Sonos speakers sound less good, or don't have this or that format, as long as the Sonos app is so fast and so easy to use that my whole family wants to use it everyday. And that is exactly what happened after we made the switch to Sonos, everyone is using it several times a day...until they met the new app update today.

So.... We found the 7.4 apk Sonos app mirror and reverted the app back to the previous version, and won't be updating : )
So, problem kinda solved...for now.

This won't be a crisis for Sonos, there are still some features that Sonos is best at, but in a tougher multi room speaker market with lots of competition, the app is now for a lot of people not the best thing about it anymore.

Personally I like the new design and feel of the updated app. I've had no issues as of yet. They will most likely introduce another update to remove bugs and make it super fast

Hopefully : ) And maybe introduce a "classical UI" mode if possible.

Some people loved the previous app version. But not the users who have come on here and said it was rubbish and a disaster and should be rolled back to the previous version....

I shall reserve full judgement until I have used it for a while

However. My initial impression is that the new app is more logical, which I personally prefer to 'intuitive', which I think usually translates as 'what I'm used to'.

'Browse' lists all my sources, and nothing else.
'My Sonos' lists the things that are personal to me - playlists, favourite radio stations etc. I would like more flexibility in how this is arranged, but I seem to have a bit more choice than under the old Favourites
'Rooms' and 'Search' are what they are
'More' is a collection of stuff I need relatively rarely, such as Settings and setup stuff.
Logical and straightforward
The 'quick grouping' facility seems to produce some odd results if you try to use it to transfer music between rooms. Perhaps I'll get the hang of that.... it isn't what I'm used to

If you have the muscle memory to work the new app then great.
That's my complaint too every time Sonos does a UI refresh for what are - IMO - little reasons to dump the existing built memory to relearn the new UI. Most complaints today stem from this source - nothing radically good or bad in the new UI except that it is different so the new UI seems clumsy till the learning happens.
But the market seems to crave such cosmetic refreshes while I am from a minority that has happily lived with the same remote for years when using my legacy kit. And in some cases, lived without a remote.
I use the Mac controller just as much and thankfully that one is a lot more stable. I hope Sonos NEVER changes it!