Retired Sonos Staff

Now Available, the New Sonos App

Introducing Navigation with Tabs:

The Sonos app now has five tabs visible at the bottom when not in the full playing screen. The tabs are My Sonos, Browse, Rooms, Search, and More. See here:

Now your most used options are available with just one click, and Now Playing is always just one tap away.

My Sonos
We’ve consolidated all your personally curated Sonos Playlists, music service playlists, and Sonos Favorites into one, easy to use page on the Sonos app. You can edit fields to move around the order, or delete them entirely. You can now have up to 40 favorites total, up from 32.

Browse
Browsing your music is even easier as it no longer hides your other options. You can browse and move to different rooms all while keeping your place in the browsing menu. There’s also a dock on the bottom of the app that gives you easy access to the navigation tabs. You can swipe it up to reveal it at any time, then back down. We’ve separated browsing your music and the menu for Settings, so it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for.

Rooms
The menu starts highlighted on the active room, featured right on the app so that it’s even easier to see what’s playing in each room. There’s now an icon on that screen to show you where the music is coming from too. That includes if it was started by Alexa. The active room has a Group button to have it add others to the party.

Search
It hasn’t changed, just moved to an easy to find spot.

More...
All the settings and options are in here. You can add services, make alarms, get some help, and access all your settings. We think this will make it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. And speaking of settings…

Explicit Language Filtering

Within Settings > Parental Controls, you can set a system-wide setting to filter songs with explicit content. Right now, this is working for Apple Music, and we’re hoping to add it for more services soon. Once the setting is on, Apple Music songs with the explicit tag will no longer play on your system.

Long Press to Group

Making it even easier to play music. With 8.0, you can press and hold the Play/Pause button (or mute on older players) to have your player join the most recently active player as a group. First, you have to start playing music on a player, (it can be from an alarm or any other source), and then just hold the button for a few seconds on another player. That second player will join the first one’s group and start playing the same music in sync.

There's another function of the long press, and that's being able to move recently stopped music to another room. First, stop playing music in any of your rooms. Then, press and hold the play/pause on another player for a few seconds. (Make sure that you don't start playing music anywhere else.) The queue or source will move to the unit you held the button for and start playing. The players won't group together and any existing queue will get whiped out in place of the new one.

iOS 11 and Android O Support

Lastly, version 8.0 has support for the latest operating systems from Android and iOS. This includes iOS 11 support for Trueplay on Sonos. Trueplay isn’t available on Android at this time.

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lars Dradrach

Lyricist II

I Can High-York recommend SonoPad If you Can live with the horisontal design.

yoyohome

Contributor I

What a mess! LONG time Sonos evangelist and owner with 6 zones, hoping to maybe add 7&8 soon. The latest iPhone app update is completely non-intuitive to me. Absolutely spoils the pleasure what I have long advocated for as a simple system. Sometimes pressing upper left, bottom, top right..WTF?

Let's walk through what's required when walking through the house from one zone to another where different music might be playing... say I start in the Office and want to change the music service.
1) Top left to get bottom menu to appear? (Okay, so I can swipe down)
2) Browse
3) Back to top left, navigate to service or selection, play
4) Mid-bottom to adjust volume

Walk through house; pass through to different zone - where need to adjust the volume in that zone
1) Top left to get bottom menu to appear
2) Rooms - scroll to find zone (Why make icons so big? and why sort by the order in which the group was created?)
3) Select zone
4) Back to the mid-bottom to adjust volume

I think it's the inconsistency of menu options; placement, and mix of ellipses, icons, arrows, X, done, checkbox. Pick a consistent location for the menu (TOP so doesn't get hidden by keyboard) and show some love for gestures? Swipe L/R to switch zones, Force-Touch (makes NO sense where it does work in music services), do something with all of the real estate for album image.:?

Sonos Evangelist

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amun

wish we could go back to that while they beta test this new interface.

They already beta tested it. However, it was a bug fixing exercise only. Any view on the design was met with the stock response that they "make sure to pass it on to the team"

I do find them a very arrogant company - they always give the impression that they know best, and that customers views are totally unimportant. I still find it unacceptable that I'll eventually be 'forced' into upgrading and have no means whatsoever to regress.

J

johncanter

Enthusiast II

Let’s face up to facts. No matter what anyone thinks, history tells us nothing will change. That is the Sonos way i.e. $*%# what the customer thinks.

I believe that the only thing issue they will respond to is the revert to dark theme as this will be easy for them. They will be too busy trying to make voice work which in my opinion is a fad. I have stated many times that there are too many variables in the Sonos ecosystem for voice to work for everything and this is now bearing fruit. Voice commands will always be limited on Sonos so don’t get your hopes up everyone and prepare yourself to put up with this UI.

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LAPhillyPhan

Contributor I

I really don't like the new app, you can't go to the room and music fast enough, the ability to attach a channel to the room is terrible process. Where is the process actually? I think I do about 5 clicks before I can even attach a channel to a room.

S

spider717

Lyricist I

Okay I'm extremely frustrated. Right now I use two different speakers. One inside and one outside. The old app made it very easy for me to switch between the music on the two different speakers. Different rooms if you will. I cannot for the life of me figure it out how to independently change or set stations. I click on the room it gives me the option to pick the second room and unclick the first but when I hit done the music simply swaps to the other room. I'm using the Android app.

Edit: im an iddiot.....there's a rooms tab. I'll leave my post in case someone can benefit from my blindness.

polarbearmusic

Trending Lyricist I

Okay I'm extremely frustrated. Right now I use two different speakers. One inside and one outside. The old app made it very easy for me to switch between the music on the two different speakers. Different rooms if you will. I cannot for the life of me figure it out how to independently change or set stations. I click on the room it gives me the option to pick the second room and unclick the first but when I hit done the music simply swaps to the other room. I'm using the Android app.

Edit: im an iddiot.....there's a rooms tab. I'll leave my post in case someone can benefit from my blindness.

You are not an idiot. The new UI is not intuitive and poorly designed, so I think the blame lies somewhere else. *Cough*

A quick Google search for "intuitiveness in ui design" would explain a lot of the shortcomings of the new UI.

I read in another thread that there is no way to roll back the UI, but the team would work to fix any issues that impact user satisfaction. Here are the main issues and some suggestions for quick fixes. Ideally the team would really take the time to do their own research and remodel the interface from the ground up, however these items need to be triaged immediately.

1. Switching rooms
Issue: The most obvious way to switch rooms from the now playing screen would be to click on the room name in red. Unfortunately this interface element only allows you to group rooms together. In order to even see the "Rooms" tab, you have to click on a small arrow at the top left. To make matters worse when you click the arrow the interface element jumps to the bottom of the screen.
Quick fix: Never hide the bottom tabs. (My Sonos, Browse, etc.,.)

2. Changing music
Issue: As many community members have observed, this is more time consuming. Favorites and playlists are on a different tab than my music library and music services.
Quick fix: Add the favorites back to the list on the Browse tab.

3. Selecting favorites/stations or playlists
Issue: If you have more than a certain number of favorites or playlists, you will not be able to view them on the "My Sonos" tab. Even in landscape mode on an iPad, you can only see 4 of either at a time. If you are lucky you can swipe to see the favorite or playlist you want to navigate to. If you are unlucky, you will have to click "See All".
Quick fix: Allow two ways to access stations and favorites. A.) From the Browse tab with the traditional list view. B.) With the large icons on the "My Sonos" screen.

There are really many more issues that need to be addressed to achieve a friendly consistent interface, but these are probably my three main issues. Again I would strongly recommend some design meetings and A/B tests against the old software. I think just one side by side test where an upper level exec attempts to change the music in two different rooms would demonstrate the frustration your users are feeling.

The old interface was much more intuitive, and I think that's why many community members, recent reviewers on the Apple Store, and recent reviewers on the Google Play Store are asking for Sonos to rollback this release.

One more thing: Favorites are now called Stations in the "My Sonos" tab. However on the PC app they are still called favorites. This inconsistency drives me crazy and would be confusing to anybody.

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User155417

Contributor I

This post is right on. I have been using Sonos for years and this latest software update has made it more difficult to switch rooms and browse music when you are on the room full screen mode. Please improve it soon. The suggestions above are good ones although feel free to come up with better ones. Just fix these new UI inefficiencies. Thanks.

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latenightbluesdj

Lyricist I

Really dislike the new app. I agree it is too bright but my primary issue is nagivating the app, especially choosing a single room to play music. I should not get frustrated trying to play music.

Was thinking of buying more speakers, reconsidering my plans now.

M

mwolfe

Lyricist I

Really dislike the new app. Very difficult to navigate. Not pretty. Had to re-add all my music. 😞

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Introducing Navigation with Tabs:

Explicit Language Filtering

Long Press to Group

iOS 11 and Android O Support

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