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Update on the New Sonos App and Future Features - October 28, 2024

The latest on the Sonos App from Nick Millington

Please also see the latest statement from Nick Millington regarding the app updates.

October 28, 2024

This is Nick Millington, Chief Innovation Officer, with an update on the Sonos app.

As our CEO Patrick Spence has said, we know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with the new app we introduced in May. Over the past several months, I, together with hundreds of Sonos engineers, have been focused on a singular objective: to improve the Sonos app and overall software experience such that it not only meets, but exceeds the experience of our previous app.

We built the new app to improve our ability to drive innovation and make future updates and improvements when needed. Since its May launch, we have rolled out ongoing updates, and while we will never stop improving our software experience, today I am pleased to share that our new app now surpasses the old one across several important performance metrics:

Issue	Equal to or better than the old app?
“Add Product”/Setup Success rate	✓
“System not found” and “Products not found” errors	✓
Configuring stereo pairs and home theater	✓
App responsiveness	✓
Crash-free sessions	✓

The items above correspond to the top issues we heard from you upon release of the new app, as measured by the volume of customer support contacts driven by each. For new customers, the experience of setting up your Sonos system or a new product for the first time is critical, and I’m pleased to share that our success rate here is now the highest we have ever measured, significantly exceeding the previous app.

Other quality benchmarks – such as eliminating incidents prompting a “something went wrong” message– were not measurable in our previous app yet are today, thanks to improved monitoring capabilities. This means we can now better ensure we’ve not only reached, but will maintain a high quality experience. (Currently, fewer than one percent of app sessions result in a “something went wrong” message.)

Although we are working with urgency to improve the app, we are also mindful of our commitment to roll out change more gradually, and apply more stringent testing. For this reason, moving forward we’ll alternate between major and minor releases, maintaining our momentum of making improvements while also ensuring adequate beta testing.

For example, today’s update is a major one, including significant improvements to system setup and reliability of adding new products, as well as improvements to volume control and responsiveness, and Local Music Library search, sharing and stability. At the same time, some features are still missing. We know that these have devoted users as well, and we are eager to restore them. In November, we’ll roll out performance improvements to Trueplay, Add Product, and general system reliability, at the same time that we beta test missing features targeted for restoration in December. These include:

Improved volume control & responsiveness (Android)
Playlist editing
Album art for music library (Android)
Support for Android users moving between multiple systems
Improved music playback error handling
Snooze Alarms

As always, you can also view detailed updates on each new release, including today’s release as well as previous ones, on our Release Notes page.

Even with improvements made to date, we know that customers will at times still run into issues. That is why we have expanded our Customer Support capacity, adding dozens of trained agents as well as weekend support. If you are still experiencing issues with our app, know that we have a team standing by to help debug or troubleshoot any challenge you are currently facing.

Having recently marked my 21st anniversary at Sonos, I want to express my deep gratitude to you for being a Sonos customer, whether you’re a first-time or long-standing one, and personally commit to you that the next 20 years hold so much more. The ease, reliability, and magic of our products is the most important thing to me and everyone else at Sonos, and the best is yet to come.

You can expect to hear from me again soon with another update on our progress.

Looking for the original update on the Sonos app from CEO Patrick Spence? You can find this archived on the Sonos blog.

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R

Ratty99

Trending Lyricist I

Thanks but I don’t think I have QoS on my BT router?

but it’s still unbelievable that 7 months after the release of this appalling new App my Sonos speakers are playing music but the app tells me ‘No Content’ !!

so I can’t turn anything off or change the music.
So frustrating and so disappointing after 15 years with Sonos. I agree with the above contributor about never buying Sonos again

Drives you mad doesn't it, madness

M

maven

Enthusiast I

I don’t know why Sonos is again so quick to claim victory; I get things are maybe working for some, but it’s clear the average user is still struggling daily… I take the above as nothing more than an attempt to cast some positive vibes over the present negative sentiment on this forum.

Here are just a few of the barriers that have stopped me from playing music today:

Endless re-authorizations for accounts. After reauthorizing, I get the same screen.

When re-authorizing Sonos Radio, I often get the message that my account does not exist (anymore I guess?).

Looking at an endless loading screen. Restarting is required to get it working.

Looking at a spinner for minutes at a time. In the end, nothing will start playing.

Endless re-tuning. Never seems to save the state for a prolonged period.

Additional issues just this week include:

System not found.
Sonos found two systems (my system now randomly splits into two with no way to manage them).
Unable to play music (on multiple speakers simultaneously or on any speaker at all).

J

JohnG666

Enthusiast II

You just have to look at the app reviews in both ios and android (in most recent order) to see what a pile of junk this still is. I won’t be changing from my 16.1 version any time soon and it makes me wonder if I ever will be able to move from this version.

S

SonosUser1125

Lyricist III

Great of you to offer help. Sonos used to be a solution even pretty non technical people could set up. Now you need to delve into the depths of networking and performing your own debugging to get basic functions working.

It’s still the case for the majority of non-technical users I suspect and it’s only in the minority of cases where some small amount of networking knowledge is required and in the majority of those cases it’s likely down to the users lack of knowledge in the first place (obviously) that their local networks are perhaps misconfigured and causing them issues with their system. - it rarely affects those that are knowledgeable, as they go onto fix the issue.

Sonos has published some aspects around this showing the new Sonos app is already equal to or exceeding five key areas compared to the previous S2 App based on the data they have gathered, during their own monitoring.

Well being I’ve been a network tech/architect for over 30 years I think I know the difference. There is no way someone without network knowledge could fault find this. There are hidden tools to help but frankly they only offer limited insight and as for the support Sonos offer, which is often based on restarting the system and ensuring you have them latest updates, I stand by my previous comment.

Ken_Griffiths

Well being I’ve been a network tech/architect for over 30 years I think I know the difference. There is no way someone without network knowledge could fault find this. There are hidden tools to help but frankly they only offer limited insight and as for the support Sonos offer, which is often based on restarting the system and ensuring you have them latest updates, I stand by my previous comment.

I’m not currently seeing any issues with the new Sonos App, ALL seems to be working well here …and maybe with your network background, I would not expect to see you encountering too many difficulties either, assuming you know the Sonos requirements and what you’re doing.

For anyone that doesn’t understand what they may need to do to resolve their own issues, then Sonos Support is certainly still an option, but I guess some things network-related may sometimes be outside their remit when it comes to providing some areas of support for Sonos products. There’s only so much "hand-holding" they likely can do - even configuring routers/managed switches for mDNS/SSDP multicast support is probably outside their terms of reference, but no doubt they will offer advice to perhaps try to assist the customer. Although like most customer support staff, there’s probably a script they are paid/trained to stick to.

In my own case, aswell as sometimes contacting customer support desks, I tend to call on friends and family with similar experience to yourself and of course read things online to usually resolve my own hardware/software issues that I encounter along the way. I’m no network expert, but will happily read my way to find an answer to most things. Admittedly though I’ve not had too much bother with Sonos, even since the changes occurred on May 7th.

FWIW: A short excerpt screen-capture recording from my own Sonos ‘controller’ App… it at least shows the App can/does work in a Home network environment:

E

EbayYellow

Collaborator II

Sonos admit that there remains issues with the app and speakers. But anyways there’s always at least one unicorn.

Ken_Griffiths

Sonos admit that there remains issues with the app and speakers. But anyways there’s always at least one unicorn.

This link below outlines what Sonos are saying (December 10th update)…

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates

E

EbayYellow

Collaborator II

Sonos admit that there remains issues with the app and speakers. But anyways there’s always at least one unicorn.

This link below outlines what Sonos are saying…

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates

Exactly. Please read this there remains many issues as they admit.

Ken_Griffiths

Sonos admit that there remains issues with the app and speakers. But anyways there’s always at least one unicorn.

This link below outlines what Sonos are saying…

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates

Exactly. Please read this there remains many issues as they admit.

Yeah, but it seems a minority are affected for some things and some improvements like "A-Z local library searching" are not what I’d call ‘show stoppers’, but more ‘nice to have’ (back) features... plus in Nick Millington's earlier update, there’s the table of 5 main categories where the new Sonos App, from data collected, shows that the new App has equalled/improved on things in those areas listed. So it’s heading in the right direction by all accounts and my own experience is based more in the majority of Sonos users, rather than the minority.

The minority though will often shout louder when things are not working for them, whereas when things are working fine, rarely do people bother to post about it. I guess that’s really where the unicorn shows up occasionally.

G

GCMG

Contributor I

Little has changed for me. I switch on the Sonos speaker and I’m told that it’s not on the system. Go through the bother of getting it setup… works for a few minutes and then either shuts down and ‘cannot be found’, or if I want to change the music the interaction with the app freezes (‘it cannot be found on the system’) but Sonos speaker continues to play previously selected tracks…

After 5 years of Sonos I’m sick to the back teeth with these issues with their app!

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