‘On this Device’ for Android controller no longer supported

If Sonos were trying to lockdown customers to a proprietary ecosystem, why do the support casting from different music service apps?  Why do they support airplay?  Why do their two latest products have aux inputs and bluetooth capacity? Playing files from android required using the Sonos app, correct?  How is that not with the ecosystem? I’m not following your logic here.

I’m not saying that the feature shouldn’t be important to you, and that maybe their’s a product out there that fits your needs better, but the motivation for the change doesn’t line up.

Personally, I never wanted my computer/phone/pad playing music because they are too fragile. Computers can crash or I might want to reboot for some reason. Portable devices need to be charged and charged more often if they are constantly playing music. A phone tethered to a charger is no fun. If the phone holder decides to walk the dog or go shopping, the music stops. With music stored on an external device connected to the network, the music never stops.

While not an option when I started using SONOS in 2005, it’s no longer a big deal to copy the library to a card if I want a copy of the music for portable use.

The 2005 SONOS players are still playing. How useful is your 2005 cellphone? I had to recycle my older cellphone because the cell towers stopped supporting it. How useful is an older iPhone/iPad/Android that cannot run many of the current Apps? 

The dominant business model that the public likes is buy once, free support forever. This strategy works for a while, but only if new customers keep buying “new improved”. But, new customers need the latest and greatest that won’t run on older, less capable hardware and operating systems. 

Apple provides AirPlay that SONOS supports. For the moment, at least, Android has made it impractical for SONOS to continue supporting music play for music stored on an Android device. It’s possible that this could change in the future, but similar to AirPlay, this new capability will probably require a new Android and SONOS device.

Nice, I always had trouble with that speaker. Constantly appearing disconnected even though no changes were made to the network in years, getting random tracks partially uploaded / skipping mid song. Never has issues with other speakers. Sonos were already pretty much dead to me for failing to deliver something that just works.

I mean, it just need to play music and recognize the standard network encoding formats.

Anyway, havent updating this thing in years, I thought perhaps an update would resolve some of these issues. I decide to check the notes to make sure they didn't do anything stupid and as it turns out, they removed the local streaming option.... Pretty much the only thing I use it for... LOL!

The nail in the coffin

Uhh.. maybe for your speaker.

I don't have any slots or cable, my only option is stream from NAS (computer) or phone.. and they just entire option. 

Funny too because those are the options that you hate.

There are large groups of people who feel that the world revolves around Airplay or Bluetooth. I don’t find either of them to be very reliable. Maybe if I was all Apple they would be better options.

I do have a noise cancelling Bluetooth headset that I use in the summer. The iPad struggles with this, the PC has virtually no issues.

I have a lot of unreleased music from artists that I listen to, simply uploading the songs to a service isn’t enough because they’ll just get taken down.

I listen to music straight from my phone because it’s convenient enough for me and has been for the last twenty years. Removing the feature I relied on the most from Sonos is insanely detrimental to how I prefer to use the app to listen what I enjoy listening to.

I’m obviously not expecting the feature to come back. But now I’m limited to what I’m able to listen to on my home theater and that sucks.

You aren’t limited in what you can listen to at home, you just can’t listen to it off your phone.

Add a local Music Library and copy your music there and you can listen to it at home.

I did that many years ago, both to have ripped-CD music when the Internet was out and to have my unreleased stuff available.

It would be nice if Sonos had the ability to get the phone makers to keep supporting stuff Sonos uses.

Thanks, I really wish I’d known that this was a feature much sooner.

At least that works. Now I can listen to all of my unreleased music again lol

Thanks, Ralpfocus. I'm using the Hi-Fi Cast app on my Google Phone and Samsung tablet and as I always like to support independent apps, I paid about £5 for a lifetime premuim subscription. It seems to be working very well, although for some functions such as playing to multiple rooms, I still have to hop into the Sonos app. It's very quick with none of the sluggishness that is normally associated with the Sonos app, although I do appreciate that it's not drawing in data from multiple services.

I do wonder though, if a third party independent app can play my Android devices' music on my Sonos speakers, why won't Sonos? 

@RJSUK 

I do wonder though, if a third party independent app can play my Android devices' music on my Sonos speakers, why won't Sonos? 

I am not entirely sure about this but I think the Sonos App tells the Sonos Speaker that it can find music on your phone and the speaker then communicates with the phone to find and fetch the music it wants to play. I suspect it is this ‘outside’ device requesting information from the phone that cause some of the issues.

HiFiCast and other such apps are uPnP/DLNA applications, now Sonos speakers uses UPnP and will identify themselves as DLNA renderers when queried (but they do not fully implement DLNA). When using something like HiFi Cast the App sends the music stream to the Sonos speaker which then plays the stream.

So the key difference is that the Sonos phone app tells the speaker to fetch the music from the Phone itself whilst HiFicast sends the music direct to the speaker.