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The new Sonos S2 App Sucks

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354 replies

Ken_Griffiths
thecoolestusernameever wrote:

I don’t actually think the new UI is a hot mess. It’s new, and new things take time to adjust to. For example, the swipe/gesture UX is new AFAIK.. I adjusted to it and like it.

However, it does have some issues and could be improved. The only one I felt is truly problematic is how many user actions it takes to get to the search box.. it is too hidden away. The Sonos logo at the top of the app is a terrible use of valuable screen real estate. The left arrow functionality is vague.. < = back.. back to what? Make that a home icon, replace the Sonos logo with a search box = problem solved.  

The play/pause responsiveness remains a bit of an issue. ~1.8 seconds to resume play is too long. Sadly, the S2 app uses Sonos’s cloud whereas S1 worked locally; S2 has to make some HTTP roundtrips to Sonos’s cloud so it will be slower out of the gate, and will probably always be slower unless they reintroduce cloudless playback. The decision to switch away from something that worked to something their engineers surely told them would be slower and their designers told them would cause user friction is beyond me. 

The playback through the Sonos cloud is my main bug-bearer too, when starting music in a service like Amazon or Apple Music - it does take a while for playback to begin, but it does at least work every time and I am reasonably patient in my old age. However I’d like things in this area to be quicker, but I don’t see such things as being a ‘show-stopper’. It used to take me a lot longer to get an album from my collection and take it from its cover/sleeve and get it playing on a turntable or cd player - so having to wait a few seconds is perhaps not that important, but still nice if the Sonos cloud could get things playing a little quicker.

Where the search bar is at the moment is not an issue for me - I don’t really care where Sonos put it - it still seems to work well for me whenever I do use it and not only helps me find what I’m looking for, but has caused me to go onto explore new music too. I find it incredibly quick to return so many results from all my services or a single music service.

T

For me.. I tend not to use playlists at all; I search an artist, album or song and play that. I use search all the time, and it’s annoying that it’s kind of hidden away.

Things played fast (meaning near-instant, not ~1.8 seconds) in the old app and don’t in the new one. That’s rather unfortunate, was entirely predictable when Sonos decided to take this approach, yet they did anyway, without sufficient testing (only testing with Sonos staff internally, as I understand it). I actually tried to use my old S1 app to compare performance, but it would have required re-adding my speakers in S1, and I didn’t want to mess up my setup, so I am sticking with S2. 

Anything over 500 ms is an eternity in a consumer app when it comes to small user actions like playing media. It should be < 250 ms or so, which is negligible enough that it feels instant for most people. The Sonos cloud HTTP roundtrip and whatever other S2 changes are clearly taking longer than that. I hope that can be improved further, maybe with local caching, http compression, more cloud-side caching etc.

Ken_Griffiths
1 person likes this
  • Ken_Griffiths
    Ken_Griffiths
jgatie
  • jgatie
  • 27696 replies
  • December 9, 2024
thecoolestusernameever wrote:

For me.. I tend not to use playlists at all; I search an artist, album or song and play that. I use search all the time, and it’s annoying that it’s kind of hidden away.

Things played fast (meaning near-instant, not ~1.8 seconds) in the old app and don’t in the new one. That’s rather unfortunate, was entirely predictable when Sonos decided to take this approach, yet they did anyway, without sufficient testing (only testing with Sonos staff internally, as I understand it). I actually tried to use my old S1 app to compare performance, but it would have required re-adding my speakers in S1, and I didn’t want to mess up my setup, so I am sticking with S2. 

Anything over 500 ms is an eternity in a consumer app when it comes to small user actions like playing media. It should be < 250 ms or so, which is negligible enough that it feels instant for most people. The Sonos cloud HTTP roundtrip and whatever other S2 changes are clearly taking longer than that. I hope that can be improved further, maybe with local caching, http compression, more cloud-side caching etc.

 

To the bolded, that would be incorrect.  The app was beta tested by users, and Sonos released it anyway.  Reports are that both beta testers and developers stated the app was not fit for release (the quote is developers were “yelling and screaming” in meetings), but they were overridden by management. 

A
1 person likes this
  • A
    Anake
T

Thanks for correcting my false assumption. I do recall reading articles about engineers telling management it wasn’t fit for release. 

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