The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

Hi @Ken_Griffiths, an observation for your consideration … a lot of customers are attracted to Sonos specifically because they do not know any of the items on your bulleted list. They want a rich music experience that “just works” … I’d venture that a good portion of Sonos’ success was built on delivering that combination!

People like you and me enjoy learning and deploying technology. While we are well represented here on these forums, we’re in the minority out in the real world.  I’ve lived and worked most of my life in Silicon Valley, and trust me, very few companies crack the code of satisfying what I call Normal People.

Three months on I’d bet that we on Team Technically Savvy have navigated the ‘new’ Sonos okay. A greater and greater portion of users with issues, therefore, will be Normal People. It behooves we ‘helpers’ to keep in mind who we are helping at this point. Give it a think ...

I take on board what you mention @press250, but I look at my own siblings, children, grandchildren and friends and they (collectively) use voice services and AirPlay (lots) with their Sonos products and my daughter-in-law uses Spotify (direct control) a lot more than she ever uses the Sonos App.

So the list isn’t just what I use myself, to play audio on Sonos products, but what I see other people around me using too… Alexa is really popular for Sonos music at a good many friends parties that the Wife and I are invited too.

So I think these things are still worth mentioning to others to perhaps help them to keep their music playing - the Sonos App is not an exclusive music playback ‘controller’ and if people were not aware of that fact, the list in my post may give some users some things to research and explore for use with their own Sonos system.

(Edit: Just to briefly mention, I’ve now gone back and added some helpful hyperlinks to my post, just to help anyone interested to research some of the options in the list too).

From all I have seen of Ken’s posts, there is no arguing that his system works for his family and for him, and that his help given to many struggling since May 2024 is well meant.

But the use of a home audio system in 2024 should not need such elaborate support/handholding - at the most, what should be needed is the old classic “turn off the power and reboot the units”.

Which is all I have to very occasionally do for all my Echo Show units that now drive my five zone Sonos kit as if that was just dumb HiFi hardware. And no, I have not had to reserve IP addresses for any of the Echo units, that work fine in a home WiFi set up created by a base router and many WiFi access points that are ethernet wired to the base router/switches, that use a mix of 2.4 and 5 GHz radios. The Echo devices just work.

Note my post followed on in response from @amblue02’s post - who has working Sonos devices, but was having trouble with zone-grouping and sluggish volume control - I was merely offering an alternative list of ‘playback’ options that provides ways to listen to audio without the Sonos App and provide some ‘room grouping’ features (which I highlight in the list too) and some different options to try that include different forms of volume control (outside the Sonos App) - I just thought it better to try those things whilst waiting for the fortnightly Sonos App updates to ‘perhaps’ fix the issue.

In my view, the things in the list are not that difficult, I have family and friends that use the things mentioned, but I have returned to the list and added some links to maybe assist, particularly as @press250 highlights they are perhaps a bit difficult for ‘normal people’ to follow - I thought they were straightforward. It just didn’t occur to me that they were difficult, so I’m sorry if people see them in that way. The links added hopefully should assist.🤞

That sounds similar to my experience with my new Yamaha devices. Plug them in or attach to wifi depending on location and they just work. My remaining Sonos devices are still on 16.1 and have behaved as they always do. Apart from one I rebooted last night, they haven’t been restarted in a year and just work.

Next week when I get the house to myself I’m going to let the upgrade monkeys loose to see what happens. I don’t use them for playing music anymore, so if they don’t behave I’ll have something to poke around in at my leisure.

I don’t do anything special to my network, apart from my internet gateway, vdsl modem, currently 4 servers and 3 switches and 10 floating k8s loadbalancer IPs nothing gets static or reserved IP addresses. Everything else, including my Wireless AP, smart home hub and zigbee gateway are on whatever dhcp address they receive and have never given any issues.

I can appreciate people spending time to configure and tweak everything in a specific way, similar to how I used to marvel at the effort some companies put into the choice of cable colours, meticulous cable routing and presentation of their cabinets in datacentre cabinets. At one time I could tell who owned the equipment in cabinets in different datacentres because they had the same designs and meticulous cabinets.

But my network is far from that and some may considere unfriendly for Sonos. There’s a mix of powerline, wifi and ethernet, servers that could leak their multiple virtual networks and overlay networks onto the lan, floating virtual IP addresses, multicast, unicast. It is used as much for work and experimenting as it is for the home network.

Will be interesting to see what happens next week. 😁

To follow up on what I wrote about Echo; Sonos apologists always rebut this by saying that Sonos architecture is such that with a lot of Sonos units talking to each other all the time, Sonos is more susceptible to network issues. 

But: the average user does not care about all this and nor should he have to. All he wants to know is what all the Sonos complexity does for him that an Echo, with perhaps lesser demands on the network, cannot or does not. 

For Echo, substitute any present day equivalent, that works out of the box like Echo does.

New app still is terrible. So sad because I feel you eroded trust so bad this is going to mean the end. Up to now we loved our whole home Sonos system.

Specifically we are still having lots of trouble adding and removing speakers from groups. Sometimes it is really slow to take effect, sometimes it just doesn’t work and we have to go back to the phone and try again. Sometimes it starts right away, then drops with a long pause, then finally returns stable.

good luck fixing this - I’ve been a fan for years but this is a mess

Okay Ken, I will check.  Could be a WiFi issue with a Play 3 zone that is on the fringe of connectivity.  I will try to resolve

There’s also the misconception that it is just the app, and therefore if you have one of these many other points of control you’ll be just fine. 

The new Sonos ecosystem is a combination of new controller invoking new methods in speaker firmware to achieve the same (one day, maybe) as the old controller and older firmware methods. What’s slightly concerning is that attempts to fix the former now appear to be regressing the latter on the speakers themselves, depending on how far down the update path you’ve managed to get. 

I agree with @Kumar, none of this should matter. Sonos play (or not!) in a space where people expect to take it home, plug it in, download an app and get it working. That’s it. If it doesn’t do that, most people will take it back. If the new way of doing things doesn’t fit that model anymore then Sonos have made a big mistake and need to figure out a way forward that gets back there. 

The problem Sonos now have, whether they like it or not is they have a reasonable number of customers with systems that are unstable enough to mean they can’t apply more speaker updates. So they may need a tool to allow a speaker update after something like a factory reset… if they can’t get the app to a point where it can get round whatever the issues are that currently make discovering some people’s speakers difficult. 

Sorry to pile in on this.

But,

I had hoped I might be able to play my music on my Sonos 9 Sonos devices soon.

They are pretty looking devices but would really like to play music from my music library.

I know there has been and shake up and re-prioritzation of features is there any hope for using them to well play music again soon? It has been a few months.

Trying to re-add my Music library just gets this error message.

Anyway I hope that this eventually gets fixed and allows my music speakers to be used for playing music.