Live Activities & Dynamic Island support on iOS

While I support the request as a ‘nice to have’ for the percentage of iOS user who have access to it, it seems a bit much to be calling it ‘a serious drawback’. 

Sonos doesn’t normally lay out their future plans, with or without dates attached. It is unlikely you’ll get anything from an official response beyond ‘we’ll pass the request on to the team’. If they choose to spend the effort, we will find out when it shows up in a software release. 

You don’t have to have Dynamic Island to use Live Activities. All devices that support iOS 16 & 17 can use Live Activities. It’s a big deal, when my music app and my podcast apps support Live Activities, and then I go to use Sonos app and it feels years behind. I can’t control playback or volume without going into the app… that is a real degradation of experience compared to most other media player apps. Seriously. 

Also, I can’t control the volume with my iPhone’s volume buttons. Why?

Ask Apple it’s their rules and limitations.

Then why can’t Sonos follow those same rules that all the 3rd party media apps I use are able to do?

It seems very odd to me that you all are so defensive of Sonos - I am just asking reasonable questions as a new user. Not having typical iOS controls that all other 3rd party media apps have, was a pretty big let down after this big investment. 

Bluesound like Sonos who follow Apple’s rules also cannot be controlled via the hardware volume buttons on Apple devices. It’s because the other Apps are playing music locally to the iOS device but Sonos and Bluesound are just controllers and no music is actually playing on your iPhone / iPad hence no access to the hardware volume controls.

Addressing the Dynamic Island & live activities, Apple have a habit of dropping features as iOS progress, the number of Apple users today who can use such functionality and who own Sonos is probably a lot smaller than you think and will over time get smaller as and when Apple decides to implement something better. In the meantime Android users get annoyed by not having specific iOS Sonos functionality so it makes absolute sense from a commercial decision to keep the builds similar as much as possible. Just don’t mention Trueplay (to Android users).

One thing most don’t think about is cost, users (not aimed at you) want features and enchantments, this forum is full of suggestions but they expect to to get these for free and for the rest of their ownership. Sonos is probably the cheapest entry into multiroom music streaming so built to a cost and one that I seriously doubt has unlimited resources for programming.

Sorry if you think I am jumping to Sonos defence, this forum is absolutely full of questions asking about the hardware volume buttons and a search would have given you the answer without posting about it.

Thank you for the explanation without the defensiveness. I didn’t think of the volume control with buttons until after I started this thread.