📲 New Sonos App Update Now Available! 📲

That should please a lot of Android users (and upset a lot of IOS users, I suspect). 

Does this require yesterday’s firmware update or will it work with the older version of the firmware?

Thanks for the update! Excited to try the new Sonos app features, especially the Android lock-screen and watch controls. Appreciate the team’s work and the rollout details. Looking forward to more improvements! 🎧📱

Great update for Android users. It’s awesome to see lock screen and watch controls back finally. I’m really hoping iOS gets lock screen controls returned soon too.

At last!

Lots of people here said that the lock screen thing is not possible due to Android restrictions. I guess that wasn't the case after all. 

Or Google changed the rules.

Correct, and Apple. Other platforms have had the Android and iOS controls for almost a year now. So I’m sure iOS lock controls will be added to Sonos soon 🤞

Or maybe some people took the advice offered by those who stated those very real restrictions to lobby over at Google to have them change.  

Apple and Google have a very simple enforcement system, follow their rules or be removed from their App Stores.

If the controls came back and Sonos is still available for installation either the rules changed or they aren't being enforced.

The rules changed for Android and iOS, sonos is just catching up (we all know why). Personally I’m looking forward to when Sonos adds this to the iOS controller, hopefully soon. 

Let me guess, you are talking about Dynamic Island?  

Well golly gee, where have I heard that before?  🙄

I don’t believe there ever were such restrictions on Android.
Android is rather permissive in regards to what apps can do and gives a lot of freedom to developers. So it is highly unlikely that Android policies could ever affect the Sonos app in that way.
Sonos more likely just lost/dropped this functionality in its rush for the “new, courageous app” to reportedly support sales of their Bluetooth headphones.
And now, after almost 2 years they are slowly restoring the highly demanded feature.

As for iOS, I can imagine that they might have or might have not some restrictions like this.
iOS is significantly more restrictive to 3rd party apps and might more likely impose such limitations.
But I’m not enough iOS expert to judge.

If this was the case, why the pre-disater 16.1 app hadn’t been removed from the app stores until Sonos killed it themseves?
Or were the restrictions from Google and Apple introduced exactly in May 2024, and Sonos was enforced to throw out the otherwise working controls from their brave new app? 😉

I received this update on my Android phone…. Is there a setting I need to change to enable lock screen stuff?

“This will be another Phased Rollout, which means that the update may not get pushed to your system right away.”

Yes and no.  Live Activities supports lock screen media controls, Dynamic Island allows the controller to be active in the notch. Both will be nice enhancements for iOS users when Sonos updates to support this. 

Whoosh!

Android.80.00.45 [28th Feb]

Still waiting for local library to show album thumbnails in queue & hd/hi res banners.

Glad to know that Sonos is listening us and working to deploy the features we need!
Also happy to discover that al the people saying these features were an imposible thing, were wrong. Nothing is impossible!