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Benf78
Contributor I
June 9, 2020

Your thoughts on the new S2 app?

  • June 9, 2020
  • 32 replies
  • 1834 views

Ive just updated to the new S2 app and wanted to share some of my thoughts and hope to hear other peoples opinions since updating. 
 

Positives:

  1. Sound quality seems to of improved following the update, I’ve tested home cinema and music and there seems to be an improvement in clarity, seems richer. I don’t know if this is my ears playing tricks on me but I’m as happy as ever with the excellent sound quality. 
  2. App opening, search and general usability/navigation seems faster.
  3. Room groups is a good feature and welcomed although I would love to see this working with Alexa so I can summon a group change via voice! Is this coming? 


Not so Positives:

  1. The update process is very cumbersome and should be completely automated, instead your community is left faffing about trying to work out what order to update things. I was stuck being told my system wasn’t compatible for s2 for some time with no clear instruction of what to do to update! 
  2. All the hype and the chance to reinvent the UI and excite their loyal community and the app is practically the same with only minor tweaks...we were all so excited for a new and shiny Sonos app! 
  3. The new colour scheme is hard on the eyes, why grey with a white menu bar? It all just blends together and looks so dated!
  4. No Dark mode….seriously? Give users the option, I assume you feel this will mess with your new colour scheme, personally I think it’s just lazy...design something that works light and dark. The now playing screen is better and clearer with the black menu bar and a coloured background drawn from the album art.
  5. The new mini now playing bar looks messy. When you are scrolling through albums they can be seen either side of the mini now playing bar now you have this new floating look and it just looks too busy, especially with the light grey dark grey white colour scheme, it all just blends together.
  6. Still no Spotify genre browsing - many of your Spotify community customers want the ability to browse Spotify genres back and were hoping for this functionality restored with this update. Instead when browsing Spotify through your app we are presented with our most listened to genres but with no options to browse all genres unless you exit your app and browse directly though the Spotify app. This has made music discovery from within your app pretty much obsolescent!
  7. What is with the new icon colour??? Very strange colour choice, and the colour isn’t replicated anywhere within your new app colour scheme other than the splash screen? This just doesn’t make sense? I would of thought you would at least inject it here and there within your app to keep some consistency in your design language….baffled? 

Hopefully this is the first update of many and more tweaking will come over the coming months based on your users feedback but I won’t hold my breath based on previous major updates. 

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      32 replies

      Benf78Author
      Contributor I
      June 9, 2020

      I think I may need to retract my final point around the app icon. I can perhaps see why you chose such an unusual app colour choice. It stands out so much on the users home screen, almost like its out of place which I suppose is actually a good thing from a marketing perspective as it draws your eyes straight to it and your brand is presented loud and clear to the user! I take it back and give you a big 🙌🏻for this design choice.....either that or you know some inside info on the upcoming universal iOS/Android design language changes for the future, perhaps we’re moving away from the flat brightly coloured era! 😂

       

      Anyway, give us dark mode and better Alexa integration as well as perhaps a quick meeting with Spotify to iron out the small browsing restrictions and I recon you will get a 10/10 from the majority of your community. 

       

      Keep up the good work Sonos!

      Flattliner
      Flattliner
      Enthusiast II
      June 9, 2020

      I can forgive them using the colour of steatorrhoea (unfortunate) for the icon, they just need to sort out the iPad app so the album art isn’t 2/3rd its size on the previous version…

      SONOS: Great hardware, terrible software.
        Benf78Author
        Contributor I
        June 9, 2020

        I can forgive them using the colour of steatorrhoea (unfortunate) for the icon, they just need to sort out the iPad app so the album art isn’t 2/3rd its size on the previous version…

        Interesting…..

        Parsnip62
        Enthusiast II
        June 9, 2020

        Underwhelming.

         

        The app has actually lost functionality. Streaming Deezer, I could go to the menu of a song or album, then a further menu, then explore the artist. Not now. The second menu has gone.

         

        It still uses a grid to display albums. Why not have the option of stacking vertically? Sooo much scrolling required when compared to other apps.

        Album artwork still take a second or so to render. Annoying - still / again.

        LastFM scrobbles are duplicated now, with the name of the speaker prefixed to the artist name on one of the scrobbles.

        Also now, whenever I play a new album I have to choose which room to hear it in? It doesn’t default to the last played any more.

        Never really been a fan of the Sonos app, but the new one has not really improved on much.

         

        Contrary to others, I do think it looks a little bit nicer than the S1. But all subjective. Really, we just want it to function well.

         

        8858oboe
        June 9, 2020

        The S2 app works exactly as it used in older versions to for my large Audible Book Collection, in other words, I still cannot sort or search the collection - fairly useless if the collection is more than a hundred books - it takes several minutes to scroll manually down the book list to try to find a book.  The book is still presented in an unsorted and ungrouped list/layout of book covers. 

        This issue is totally with the Audible implementation, sorting of other large lists and collections works fine.

        I have provided a diagnostic number for support - I am not confident it will ever get fixed.  The folks at Audible just refer me to the Apple Audible App - which works well enough for most purposes.  But the Sonos is claimed to support Audible books - it does not to any useful extent in large book colllections.  My previous five (5) submission did not generate a single response.

        Other than this - the sole reason I bought Sonos a couple of years back - S2 works.

        Airgetlam
        Airgetlam
        June 9, 2020

        Unfortunately, Sonos has to rely on the data that is given them by the folks at Audible. Sonos has not access to the code running on the Audible servers. So if Audible chooses not to integrate the full API that Sonos has written for the purpose, there really isn’t much Sonos can do about it, other than be petulant and remove Audible from the Sonos experience. 

        Bruce
          HighEndMusic
          Prodigy I
          June 9, 2020

          Underwhelming.

          Also now, whenever I play a new album I have to choose which room to hear it in? It doesn’t default to the last played any more.

          Regarding this - try to disable the App setting “Confirm location”

          That should fix this issue.
          ​​​​​

          acinpdx
          Lyricist III
          June 9, 2020

          One would think it might be a simple coding problem to not separate the old hardware users on a separate app. The app could recognize the old equipment and apply different rules to it.

          But it seems Sonos is intent on forcing a lesser experience on the legacy owners, plenty of whom own multiple units new & old, and notably who helped build this company up by their enthusiasm over the years.

            melvimbe
            melvimbe
            June 9, 2020

            One would think it might be a simple coding problem to not separate the old hardware users on a separate app. The app could recognize the old equipment and apply different rules to it.

             

            How would that work for people that are running slit systems S1 and S2?  As well, it would also mean that as S2 gets new features, S1 would have to be retested to verify nothing broke.  With separate apps, there is no chance of that.

             

            Danny
            acinpdx
            Lyricist III
            June 9, 2020

            One would think it might be a simple coding problem to not separate the old hardware users on a separate app. The app could recognize the old equipment and apply different rules to it.

             

            How would that work for people that are running slit systems S1 and S2?  As well, it would also mean that as S2 gets new features, S1 would have to be retested to verify nothing broke.  With separate apps, there is no chance of that.

             

            if it can be done in separate apps, it can be done in a single app...the old stuff just gets sandboxed. Sonos engineers will be doing the work either way working on both apps.

            At the end of the day, the app is just delivering music to the speakers. The old hardware can handle that just fine. Sharing between legacy & new hardware is exactly the kind of thing software is good at.

             

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