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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ryan2

Lyricist III

So, if I want to listen to music late at night because I can't sleep, I have to blind myself with the bright white background and then fumble around with twice the number of button presses as I had before?

Also, why are you wasting so much space on the screen? It's like a child's version with "big pretty icons" but no real functionality.

FIre your design department. READ the reviews on the Play Store... This is an EPIC FAIL! You have more one star reviews than two or three star reviews - and the VAST MAJORITY of newer reviews are complaints against your growing idiocy.

Agreed. Read the reviews on the Playstore. I read about 100 of the most recent reviews. Every single one... 100% are extremely negative. Seems to be a consensus the new app is a epic failure. How Sonos reacts to the feedback will determine the true nature of the company. I will be looking for an alternative if the app isn't fixed or we aren't given a way to downgrade to the old app. And I've invested thousands of dollars... 2 sound bars, sub, speakers in every room. I gave myself 3 weeks hoping I would hate it less over time. Sadly, the more I've used the new app the more I realize just how bad it really is. Possibly the worst software upgrade I've ever experienced.

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ryan2

Lyricist III

What a mess!

Poor design, unstructured flattened navigation, more clicks than before to do the same, looks quite unsophisticated and immature.

Classic case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

I would add a vote with the folks that dislike the new app.

And not because "I don't like change" and some people just don't like change.

Specifically, the dark version of the old app was "better", and the layout and flow of the old app was more intuitive. Of course I will eventually get used to this new flow, but I do believe that it was a downgrade in terms of usability, layout, and overall feel of the app. Earlier tonight I was playing music in the garage, and then went into the basement home gym. Getting music to stop in the garage, then select music to play in the Home Gym zone was cumbersome. Took me a few times to get it all right, and not accidently start grouping things. In the end, it seemed like more steps and cumbersome just to select the zone I want to play music. I tried this several more times with different zones and still don't really get how to properly stop music in one zone and play music in another.

As others have noted, typical app design by someone who is a "designer" and not a "user", with no input taken from users. As you see in this thread, MANY of the same complaints are repeated. How did that pass quality control, beta testing, and user input to end up like this? I'm sure there many of us who don't understand the true difficulty in coding and app design and might not "get it"...but ultimately since Sonos already had a good app, and downgraded...I think maybe this isn't about users "not getting it"...and more so about the company "not getting" it's users.

You won't ever get used to it or learn to like it, trust me. I gave it 3 weeks of constant use and I would conclude the UI was created by people who don't use the app, or they have a single speaker in a single room and always listen to the same station.

M

MoxyP

Trending Lyricist I

Joining the #whitemustdie movement. Or maybe #whitemustdarken.
With the new, stark design it's now brighter than every other app on my devices -- except the flashlight app!

Even if you don't want to return to black, would you consider a light gray or off-white?

(Me, I have an eye condition that makes staring at bright screens extremely uncomfortable but based on comments, I suspect a lot of people would appreciate a less glaring UI.)

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ilbonfi

Contributor I

Bought, just Arrived. Configured seamlessly, added to the others. It sounds very good. now the kitchen joined the party!

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simontillotson

Lyricist I

How do I 'Downgrade' back to the old App?

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M.W.

Contributor I

I am very, very dissatisfied with the latest Sonos controller update for iOS devices.

Let me be clear that I use the Sonos controller exclusively with my iPad – almost always in “landscape” (rather than “portrait”) mode. As a result my chief concern is how poorly the new Sonos controller uses the available screen resource.

1. The white controller background is far too bright. I see from the tread Sonos has been getting an earful (eyeful?) on this from a lot of its users. Compares very poorly to the former black background with subtle variation provided by the “halo-ed” thumbnail icon (station name, album cover, etc) – which I thought was classy/sophisticated.

2. I badly miss the command menu on the left edge of the screen. At a glance, everything you needed (favorites, playlists, library, device, line-in, app services, etc. ) was in one place. The menu only took up a column of one-quarter/one-third my available screen real estate – it did not crowd the display of sub-menus and media browsing.

3. I greatly dislike having to toggle between “My Songs” (why is this not called “Favorites”) and “Browse” (why is this not called “My Library”). And these new icons are small, little, ill-defined shadows on a “Navigation” bar at the bottom edge of the controller. Why? In the prior Sonos controller all was on one handy menu (see above). Why make users take extra steps?

4. Why are icons in “My Sonos” so darn big? The prior Sonos controller could show me 12-15 “Favourite” album thumbnails at a glance on one screen. Now I see only 4 album thumbnails (more about which below). Why? A waste of screen real estate…

5. In “My Sonos”, when you “See All” stations or albums, why does the controller insist on listing (for example) the albums at the left edge of the screen? Why can’t the album thumbnails be tiled across all available screen real estate, as it was before, giving you 12-15 album thumbnails at a glance and thus more information? As it is, at least two-thirds of my screen real estate is wasted.

5. When you “Browse” “Albums” in your “Music Library”, the thumbnail icons are ridiculously large (see like complaint above). Only 8 album thumbnails a creen? C’mon, there should be at least 12-15. More waste of screen real estate…

Finally, I have contacted Sonos several times on this: the controller absolutely needs to support a “Date” tag. For anyone with a decades deep music collection, I think this is a must. You should be able to sort Albums within a single Artist by Date (of the album), not just Album title alpha-sort. The Music Library should have a Date (of the album) sort alongside Artist, Album, Composer, Genre and Song. Plus you should be able to see Date (of the album) in “Now Playing”. This used to be my only complaint about an otherwise solid Sonos controller … until all the new issues (above) since the controller was overhauled (for the worse).

BTW I say this as a supportive 6+ year Sonos customer, who has convinced at least half-a-dozen friends and acquaintances to start using your product – all of them enthusiastically.

Hope the Sonos controller will change (revert?) for the better soonest.

M. W.
Ottawa, Canada

Ryan SAuthor

Retired Sonos Staff

Thanks again for the feedback. And M.W. that's a really detailed post, thanks for taking the time to share! We'll make sure your feedback gets to the team so they can work with it for future editions of the app. It'll keep evolving as we go on.

Mark good posts by pressing the like button, and select the best answer on questions you've asked to help others find solutions.

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Sammy Johannesson

Contributor I

Please!! Get me the old app back!! I am a rookie Sonos user with several devices and the new app is almost making my cry 😞

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inquisitive

Contributor I

Just wanted to add my two cents to the Sonos team regarding the recent changes to the iOS and Android apps. Start with the positive - they both look fantastic. Really clean looking and the black and white aesthetic works well with the direction the hardware is going.

Now for the bad. The UI is extremely confusing for someone with a multi-room setup. The two layers of room settings is frustratingly unintuitive. I'm constantly mixing up which is which and getting stuck into the wrong part of the interface. There should be a consistent room switcher at the bottom of every screen. Hoping this will be fixed soon.

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Bill_67

Contributor II

Bad effort, trying to give the new UI a fair chance but its just not that good. Don't like having to navigate between all those screens. I wish they gave the Windows app the update.

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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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