New Sonos app removes key features - beware!

I think it’s worse that just those features missing. This is what I found when one of my alarms to play music was sounding the Sonos Chime this morning. Updated the app and that broke just about everything...

• The UI is not well thought out: In System Settings you have to figure out that most settings are hidden behind “Manage.” Then when you tap that, for all options on the “Manage” slide-over, you have to tap the carrot “<” next to “SONOS” to go back a menu level. The carrot isn’t even part of the side over.
• The lack of attention to the UI makes it more understandable that they forgot to include a way to create an alarm...
• To add insult to injury, when I was looking at the alarm that didn’t play correctly this morning, the app deleted the alarm either when I tapped on it, or when I force-quit it. Now there’s no way to recreate it.
• It also seems the new app and/or speaker updates broke the queues on my speakers. I couldn't resume any music shown in the app on any speaker.
• The app reset my preferred service to Sonos Radio, which I don’t use at all.
• All “My Favorites” (now “pinned collections”) are broken; they don’t play at all. Apparently I have to delete them all and recreate them. (this happened with S2)
• Playing from my local music library takes forever.  Seems broken. Apple Music can’t be played; reauthorized. Still doesn’t work.
• Seems Amazon Music, Apple Music, Plex, etc all had to be re-authorized before they would work. Plex and local still do not work.
• Even the working services take several seconds to load their content pages. Sometimes that fails. And it takes 10 sec or more for selected music to start playing.
• Local music server is gone from sources and no way to reinstall it!

Stay away!

This might be nitpicky but the sticky Now Playing bar at the bottom of the screen is a real UX head scratcher.

It acts like a bottom sheet… sort of? Swiping it up opens Your System, but tapping it opens Now Playing.

There are a few wonky navigation decisions like that in this update for sure.

My experience has also been poor. Instead of giving us a better experience and adding features many of us have waited for for years, we get less. I had thought Sonos had learned from the S1 / S2 app disaster, but appears the app side of the house needs a total reset at the company given how poor this update is. Sonos isn’t listening to it’s core customers and that’s going to create detractors.

It’s yet another terrible move by Sonos. They are by far the worst company for genuinely not understanding how their customers use their products. 
 

My music services, including Plex, are all working here in the new App and I can see my NAS local library service too… the ’Search’ facility is the same/similar to the old (new) S2 search  (but without the old classic search). I expected that. All my Sonos ‘rooms’ that were on the system tab, now slide up screen from the bottom, I would describe it as an extension to the minimised ‘Now Playing’ screen.. I think it’s more a case of not yet being ‘familiar’ with things. I think the App perhaps could be a little quicker too, but maybe further optimisation will come later, after all the dust has settled. 

It’s clear (to me, at least) that some features, are still to be rolled out, such as adding tracks to the queue and ‘play next’ etc. as they are shown in the preview screens on Sonos.com - so I’m thinking that what we’re seeing now, are the core features at the moment and that there’s still more to come a little further down the line. 
 

I just need to become much more familiar with the new interface - I’ll worry about any missing features later, but at least all my system is working/playing here.

Sonos is a master at changing things customers like and want to something that is frustrating and less and less useful.  They should have done a thing with two apps and stay on the old one if you want to. 

I suspect that the new app had to be rolled out to in advance of the rumored new headphones as setup and new features that may be associated with the headphones are only coded into the new version of the app.   

Sleep timer and alarms seem gone…

Stations are gone from the main page.

Mute button seems gone as well.

Sonos Radio and TuneIn are signed out and I sign in fails with error about missing internet connection. Other stations work fine but search seem broken on a number of services. 

App released in Denmark just af support was about to close and I was told that they disconnected calls within minutes... That wasn't told when the release would drop - no extra support even though they have announced the release for weeks…

I was told that Sonos Radio probably wouldn't work another week.

Not happy with this at all.  The new app doesn’t seem to let me play from my local library.  This is an ESSENTIAL feature, Sonos.  This is why I’m on Sonos and not BluOS.  And I can’t downgrade or even use the older version of the app from a different device.

You need to offer an opportunity to roll this back until it’s fixed.  Local libraries on a NAS is the most BASIC Sonos feature.

Also - when scrolling a long list - what happened to the letters that let me skip down.  I have to scroll manually now?  That’s HORRIBLE.

This is why I used to beta test so I could at least TRY and get these obvious things fixed.  I’ve been on Sonos over 10 years (I have ZonePlayers, for cripes sake) and I’ve never seen anything this bad.