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Mike H
Retired Sonos Staff
May 14, 2024
Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

  • May 14, 2024
  • 770 replies
  • 65992 views
Sonos App Redesign AMA

Today is the day of the AMA!

The new app design has been out for a week, and most of you have had a chance to get used to the new UI.

Some of you might have questions when you have had a week to get to know the new Sonos App interface. Because of that, we want to give you all a chance to ask some of the people who were integral in its creation and design, the questions that have come to mind while you have used the app.

As we mentioned in the event.

Our panelists will be:

  • Diane Roberts, Senior Director of Software Development
  • Kate Wojogbe, Senior Director of User Experience
  • Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management

It will be hosted on the 14th of May from 11:00 until 14:00 GMT -07.

But instead of me telling you what they do and what their role with the app update has been, here are their own introductions:

 

Diane

Diane Roberts is the Senior Director of Software Engineering and Product Management at Sonos responsible for the Sonos Apps. Her group of cross-disciplinary teams build Configuration, Control, and Content experiences on a foundation of Core mobile application technologies. She received dual Bachelors’ of Science in Computer Science and Music from WPI. Diane holds 6 granted patents as a co-inventor.

 

Kate

As Senior Director of User Experience, Kate leads the UX team responsible for Sonos’ home audio hardware, software, and app user experiences. This includes user interfaces on speakers and soundbars, setup for hardware and services, first and third party content experiences, and a variety of methods of control of the Sonos system. Kate graduated from the University of California Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design.

 

Tucker

Tucker Severson is the Director of Product Management and leads the PM team responsible for the Sonos Apps. Tucker received his BA from Bates College and his MBA from the University of Vermont.

 

We will do our best to answer as many of your questions as possible within the 3-hour window, but we can’t promise to answer every question, especially those you know we can’t discuss.

But if we see a question repeated or a reply getting a lot of likes, don’t worry. We will prioritize those to ensure that many people get the answers they seek.

 

Remember, we can’t talk about things on the roadmap - but if you have questions or feedback about the app redesign, want to know more about our panelists, like their background or favorite band, then the sky is the (cough cough.. NDA) limit!

Thank you, everyone, for participating. We covered as many of the most asked questions as possible. We know tracking the responses wasn't as easy as we had hoped. But we wanted to let the community air frustrations and have their questions answered.

I got a lot of DMs during the AMA, and I will be sure to answer them when I can. Thanks for reaching out!

Keith and I will work on recapping all the questions and feedback we have responded to, and we will update the post here when that is complete. If we didn't get to your question, don't worry. Keith and I are grabbing all the feedback from this thread, even the things we didn't respond to, and ensuring the right people will see the message. This was the first time we created a live AMA in the community, and we learned a lot for future AMAs.

We appreciate all the feedback and questions you gave through this AMA. It helps us understand your most significant feedback and your reasoning. We hear you, and we will ensure the right teams get your feedback. They are listening.

We look forward to rolling out the updates with features (new and old) as soon as they are ready. Keith shared an overview of the timeline for expecting these features to return to the app. Today was the first update, reintroducing alarms and improving the iOS voiceover.

We look forward to seeing your reactions to our future app developments. We hope you all appreciate the work our developers are putting into making the app as fast and easy to use as possible for the general user.
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770 replies

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

I’d really like my speakers to just show up after restarting the app.  Every time, I reset the app, find my speakers on the local network, sign in, and the speakers are gone.  Okay.  Re-add the Boost.  Speakers appear.  Get out of the app and back in again?  Speakers are gone.

 

I’m glad it works for some people.  It doesn’t work at ALL in my experience.  And I’ve repeated the setup multiple times and get the same thing. 

CronoCX
Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

In terms of this new API (I guess v2?), is Sonos going to extend it to other Service Vendors like Plex to incorporate into their support of Sonos products? How will it effect those of us who have Local NAS systems that power their libraries? Will Users be given the ability to disable outside access if we don’t want it? I’d like to keep my speakers local and internal to my network.

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

 

A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely.  Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.


Please, make local APIs well-documented for free, or if that is already the case, issue a statement that everything that can be done with the speakers is available via this local API and will remain so, with a link to the documentation. 

End users may never trust the software team again until that trust is earned back, but if someone can create their own paid apps that solve the missing functionality, that may end up being best for everyone.

May 14, 2024

The new app has the ability to organise sections on the home screen (recently played, favourites, services, sources). But it doesn’t have the ability to organise sub-sections within the favourites section. Please consider adding this functionality.

Lyricist I
May 14, 2024

All I want is to be able to listen to music from my local library. Right now I’m able to access the files, but I can’t add them to a playlist (all my previews playlists, consisting of local music, are gone as well). Cover art is not showing as well. Please tell me that this function is still a priority to you. I didn’t invest in my Sonos system to be eventually be forced to pay for a streaming service…

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

I am not sure that this format for an AMA was appropriate.   You basically have people posting hundreds of questions with responses coming based on the popularity of the question. How is this different than any other forum within the community?  So, I am expected to scroll through 22+ pages of questions to figure out what has been asked and answered?  And the amount of pages are growing by the minute. 
 

Why didn’t you do a Teams/Zoom meeting? Or even a Twitch event would have been better than this!!!

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

@KateW 

When the app was getting ready to be released, what were your personal feelings regarding the new app?

Did you anticipate that it would be so poorly received? 

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

I noticed that the re-introduction of alarms actually required an update to Sonos devices as well as the app today. Does this mean that the new UI revamp was in fact much more than just a revamp to the UI? Are there currently bigger changes happening on the device side as well?

@Aleksander H

The app is definitely a revamp, but it’s not just the UI that changed! This new app is using new features on the speaker firmware and new cloud services as well. Let me share a bit more about what happened with alarm settings. 

On the morning of the app launch, we discovered a data corruption error around the new Alarms APIs. The corruption could cause alarms to go off in the wrong room at the wrong volume with the wrong content! In order to save your alarms, we made the difficult decision to remotely disable the alarm settings feature and then completely lock it out. It allowed us to make sure your alarms stayed as they were - but at the steep cost of taking away your ability to change them yourself.

The team rallied to make sure we could turn this feature back on safely - and today we are so delighted to say that we have re-enabled alarm settings. To get this feature, you must do a full system update. 

But that’s not how we expect to introduce features every time. We have built the new app to be able to update independently of the speaker firmware. As we go forward, you can expect us to bring out new features with smaller, less intrusive, updates.

Once again, you Sonos folks like to pat yourself on the back for returning features that you removed in the first place.  By saying that you “rallied” to bring back this functionality makes it sound as if you were doing battle on our behalf when the fact of the matter is you were doing battle to try to recover from your own ineptitude.  I do NOT care what the background is about the removal of the alarm functionality.  You just should not have put out this new app without actually beta testing it and running it through QA first.  And when you put out a new app of such magnitude, you need to give people a warning about what might be missing if they upgrade.  Long story short, you had your own internal reasons for putting out this app that had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS and everything to do with your own selfish reasons.

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

As someone who was about spend a not inconsiderable amount of money to replace my NAS please can Sonos please provide some clarity on future functionality in the near future.
 

Specifically is SMB v1 gone (confused as my very old NAS seems to be working still)? Are the SMB v2 bugs I heard people using SMB v1 to avoid fixed? Will search and navigation in the app be fixed to make using a NAS and local library worthwhile again? 
 

Thanks

SMB v1 is gone. I can confirm SMB v2 works just fine. Keep in mind though, once you approach 65,000 tracks it can get dicey.

Contributor I
May 14, 2024

Will Patrick Spence have the courage to make an open apology to all the SONOS users in regards of the new app release?

If he doesn’t,  he should resign, because if Sonos don’t admit their mistake there will be massive backlash…as is blatantly obvious from this AMA. 
 

…and users will choose to either wait for an online old version or compatible alternative, and/or start looking for a new brand of products. Three months on, watch the share price collapse…then Patrick Spence will no longer be CEO.

Show genuine humility Patrick. This is New Coke. An absolute case study of an internal echo chamber deciding what users should want, rather than working with the loyal community that has built up around Sonos since it started….and I’ve been there since those very early days.