What does it have to do with Sonos?  Is it a 3rd party Sonos controller app?

Yes, its a controller for SONOS, with the Apple Remote running on Apple TV.

Never heard of it. What is your experience with it?

2 week ‘free trial’, after which there is a subscription., which appears to be $.49 monthly, or $4.99 per year. They don’t have an image of a ‘Now Playing’ screen. Website appears to be www.sitnos.com

 I don’t usually play music while my TV is on, I tend to use the iOS controller. 

Thanks for the heads up on this app. I decided to install it and quickly give it a try, as I guess I’m old school and enjoy the visual experience of seeing the album artwork on my TV while listening to music.

While this app does give you some decent functionality in terms of controlling your music on your different Sonos speakers via your Apple TV device, its interface could be dramatically better. In effect, it seems to be designed by an engineer rather than a user interface designer (who understands usability and the user experience).

The worst thing though is that the “Now Playing” screen (if you even want to call it that) is basically just the one box-like visual that you see on the speaker selection screen. So instead of list of speakers and what they’re playing, side by side, it just shows the one speaker and what’s playing on it in a very small form factor, instead of larger or full screen. Even worse, it doesn’t accurately show the album cover of what’s playing when using a music streaming service like Amazon Music but it did show an album cover when playing from my personal Library.

All said and done, it’s definitely not ready for prime time yet, as it needs some serious improvements.

In terms of Apple TV apps for Sonos, I would pay for a beautifully designed app that did nothing but displayed what’s playing on my Sonos speaker (i.e. something like Apple Music’s Now Playing). Either $5-10 as a one time cost or alternatively, I’d pay $1-2/year, if the developer wanted to go a subscription path.

What’s sad is that there was an app called Tunesmap that did this but the developer ceased work on it, as he gave it away for free but was trying to create a paid service on the backend for musicians to share their photos & info (at least that’s what it looked like). If this guy remade this app, by simply ditching the background artist photos and increasing the album shown on the screen, I’d seriously pay him $5 just for that functionality. Alternatively, I wish Sonos purchased the app from him and quickly modified it for Sonos specifically (as it used to work with Spotify Connect as well).

@Fisky deserves the thanks, I just added some details.

I’m one of those who prefer to listen to music without visual distraction, I’ve never felt the need to see album covers and the like. There are those that do, and that’s fine, it just isn’t a necessary feature for me. 

FYI, Sonos has an open API that pretty much anyone can use.  You don’t need a license or any sort of permission to create your own interface into Sonos. So what sometimes happens is that a developer who happens to know something about Apple TV and Sonos decides to make their own app for their own use.  Then they decide that others might find it useful and maybe they can make some spare change, or put it out on github.  These tend not to take off as there is never much marketing effort, and they are typically designed for the developer who wrote it more than being user friendly to the masses.  And developers tend not to like spending a lot of time doing maintenance/patch work.

But anyway, I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Sonos creating an AppleTV app.  If it’s free, it would have to be justified by increased product sales.  Hare to do.  If they charge a license/subscription fee, people will question why AppleTV costs money and the other apps are free. Still others will complain that Sonos is showing favoritism by not making an android TV, roku, or other branded app. 

Hi All,

I’m from the small team that is working on this App. One of our volunteer beta testers sent us a heads up that this thread had appeared, so I thought I would pop in and say hi.

Really appreciate all the feedback so far. And we agree with all the criticism. We’ve been focusing on getting core functionality working (e.g. network plumbing), not polishing the user interface. Melvimbe is right, there is a fairly open SONOS Web API, so anyone is free to start down this road. But there’s also a whole other SONOS local network API that is a little older that is also pretty crucial to talk to as well (e.g. for access to the local media library). And you need infrastructure servers out on the public internet to handle account linking, communications for data coming from SONOS, etc., etc. So it’s been a few months of fairly heavy lifting just to get to this stage.

And Nollind is also correct; the UI needs a lot of work, metadata updates are laggy, cover art is not being well cached, etc. etc. We are working on that, and that’s where feedback is really important to us. Any emails to feedback@sitnos.com will be very welcome. You can also leave comments here of course, although we’re hesitant to turn this discussion thread into a support forum  :-)

Please keep the comments and feedback coming ...

Best,

Dave from SITNOS

Dave, this is great to hear. I said I’d pay $2/year for a well designed now playing app in itself but if you can achieve that in the future with your app plus have all of your other features you mentioned, I’d be happy to pay your current yearly subscription. I’ll keep an eye on your apps development in future.

PS. Please include more screenshots of your app when you update it (i.e. improve the Now Playing screen, etc), so we can see how things are improving visually in terms of the interface and functionality. Thank you.

   Will do, and thank you again for all the feedback already.

I started porting my Windows app to Apple TV, and all the back-end code went over without issue (.NET Core ftw) but I quickly got lost in the weeds of the UX. Really not a fan of Apple’s frameworks. I use Xamarin Forms on my iOS app to avoid it, but on Apple TV you have to use the native framework. Maybe I’ll try again this winter.

   Amen to that. The SwiftUI framework is really its own universe, and parts of it are really lacking (the tvOS functionality always seems to be the ugly stepchild of iOS stuff, with some things missing entirely).  You do, however, get a lot of stability benefits from the underlying Swift features, which we are still getting familiar with and really like. Never had a runtime error, segfault, etc., even in very early builds, as the Swift null safety approach is really all encompassing.

God no, I’m not touching Swift with a barge-pole. (Did they learn nothing about syntax from the Objective-C square-bracket vomit?). For me its C# or nothing :-)

     The square bracket reference does bring up (bad) memories of Objective-C, but there is some kind of interesting stuff in Swift. The newish async/await stuff is pretty slick. The “extension” system for being able to add methods to other/pre-existing classes (“retroactive modelling”) is pretty powerful.

    Of course none of this stuff isn’t already available in other languages, which does beg the question of why Apple has poured so much energy into it.