Skip to main content
Mike H
Retired Sonos Staff
May 14, 2024
Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

  • May 14, 2024
  • 770 replies
  • 65990 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.
​​

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

770 replies

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

How do i stop this AMA from emailing me every reply????? 

Fix your notifications Dogg!

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

ordering some in wall loudspeakers for our new home, i told my girlfriend i was affraid to bind me to sonos. ( the s1/s2 debacle )

anyway, i have ordered them,... and i will return those items to the reseller. 

 

lucky we did not install them yet

 

i cant trust a company making mistakes on this magnitude twice

its frustrating you cant play your own music ! can you imagine Sonos?

Contributor I
May 14, 2024

Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?

Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.

Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

 

Hi @Absolute40 ,

Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.

Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.

There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience. 

It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.

One thing there, having some fonctionality ( NAS playback) in the event my internet goes down is cool. Please make sure it fallback as gracefully as possible in that case. 

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Two hours in and here we are (numbers in brackets are the count at 1 hour)

@DianeRobertsApps - 4 (0)

@KateW - 5 (3)

@tuckerseverson - 3 (2)

 

One has to wonder if they have to run every response past corporate laywers given the amount of time it seems to take them.

 

And some stats of my own counting:

Respect shown to customers - 0

Horrific discoveries - 2

  • Data corruption issue in alarms didn’t stop a release.
  • All speakers now available on the public internet protected only by a users password.

Feedback/suggestions actually taken by Sonos - 0

I suspect the ‘every response having to go through legal’ is likely true here. This is like no AMA I’ve ever been on!

(Well we can ask literally anything but they absolutely won’t answer).

My biggest disappointment is the lack of humility here or the willingness to acknowledge the actual disaster this has been.

Some of the responses have been utterly deaf. Read the room guys, seriously!

Headliner I
May 14, 2024

Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?

Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.

Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

 

Hi @Absolute40 ,

Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.

Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.

There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience. 

It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.

I don’t think anyone is asking for the old version to be upgraded with new features we just want to be able to use it until the new one is actually ready. And @DianeRoberts your last sentence about fine tuning and performance supports our case. The new app is not complete and not ready for prime time usage it is at best a Beta that customers can experiment with alongside the old one.

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

Can somebody from Sonos simply say “Sorry”?

webmink
Prominent Collaborator I
May 14, 2024

Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?

Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.

Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

 

Hi @Absolute40 ,

Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.

Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.

There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience. 

It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.

@DianeRoberts 

Personally I would be perfectly happy to make the judgement call on when to switch, just as I did with the S1 → S2 switch.

What is making me and others so unhappy is you took away the capabilities we relied on to use our own equipment, without asking (in fact having promised not to) and now when we ask why you just “haters gonna hate” at us all. Given your timeline leaves my (very expensive) system in a state that makes me unhappy for nearly three months (and you have not even mentioned when widgets are coming or whether you will make the app work on Chromebooks again), offering a choice (covered in warnings its unsupported and will break) seems preferable to making me equate Sonos with expensive dissatisfaction every day...

Support musicians by buying music instead of streaming.
Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Can get clarity on why some services have been dropped, like Stingray.

...please, not a generic answer, a real answer :) 

Is this due to a change in your app APIs, standard agreement, fees, other? 

 

Headliner 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? 

@Sam_5  Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.

So we suffer to make you happy and excited about your new App?

DianeRoberts
Sonos Employee
May 14, 2024

@DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the new app is built using Flutter rather than native apps to make a one-size-fits-all app?
What was the reasoning behind this? To save development costs?
I’m failing to see the advantage to the user, it’s slower to open and laggy, missing widgets, when installed on a large screen like a tablet it doesn't make good use of the extra screen real estate. 

@Absolute40 

The app is not exclusively built with Flutter, but does make use of Flutter for certain portions of the setup experience. We’ve actually been using Flutter for those experiences for many years, and ported that forward to the new app.

The majority of the app is in fact native. On iOS that means Swift, using SwiftUI. On Android that means Kotlin, using Jetpack Compose. These are the best in class layout engines offered on their respective platforms, and we’re excited to be able to use these modern technologies.

We are aware that there is work ahead for the tablet experience, and look forward to iterating on that as we go forward.