If you use Sonos speakers, there’s a good chance you’ve used their app and found yourself at least a little frustrated at some point. I don’t think it is one bad app, considering the many functions it has to handle: finding and playing music from dozens of services, managing multiple connected speakers, guiding people through setup and troubleshooting, and so on. But at least you can assume that it is getting a bit old. Sonos also knows this and is announcing a completely new app for Android and iOS that has been rewritten from the ground up. It will be available on May 7th.
I spoke to Neil Griffiths, vice president of user experience and user research at Sonos, about the redesign and he said it was the result of conversations with hundreds of customers about their listening habits and the way they want to use the app. From these discussions, two principles emerged that the company followed for the new app. One of them was to make it easier for people to play whatever audio content they have, be it streaming music, podcasts, radio, audiobooks, devices connected to Sonos speakers like TVs or record players, and more. The second is to make the app a hub better suited to reaching exactly what you want to hear.
The end result is a much simpler app – the old one had the usual five tabs at the bottom, three of which could be used to find music. Now there’s a single, customizable home screen with a persistent search bar and content rows. By default, you’ll see a Recently Played section at the top that pulls content from all the services you use. Below that you’ll see a carousel of the different services you’ve connected to Sonos. There is also an area that controls various inputs, e.g. B. Line-in to speakers that support it or TVs connected to soundbars. This allows you to tap it to switch between streaming music and playing it on the connected device.
There’s still a Now Playing bar at the bottom of the app that you can tap for full playback controls and volume settings. However, if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen, you’ll get a view of your entire Sonos system instead. This shows all your speakers and what is playing where; From here you can adjust the volume for each individual speaker or group speakers.
However, the best thing about this new app is the customizable home screen. Not only can you change the order of what you see there, but you can also pin content directly from different apps so you can access it instantly. For example, Spotify, Apple Music, and virtually all other music services typically have a “New Releases for You” section that displays current albums based on your listening habits. If you want to always see this, you can pin it directly to your home screen and it will dynamically update when Spotify has new favorites. And you can rearrange these carousels so that your most used one appears at the top of the screen.
The old Sonos home screen had a Recently Played section at the top and allowed you to pin songs, albums, playlists and stations from across your services, providing a degree of flexibility. But the ability to add full, dynamically updated sections from the apps you use seems like a big step forward. I can easily imagine pinning half a dozen lists from different apps to my home screen, making the process of launching music from the Sonos app itself much smoother. I still primarily use AirPlay or Spotify Connect to broadcast to my speakers, but I think it’s worth setting up my home in this new app and seeing if I use it more often. Bringing together content from the too many streaming apps I use in one place sounds like a nice improvement over jumping back and forth across apps depending on what I want to listen to.
Sonos has also made it easier to jump right into the service of your choice. Any streaming apps you’re signed in to will also appear in a carousel, with your default/favorite option always at the top of the list. The same goes for search – when you open the search bar and type something, you will get the results of your favorite service first.
The company is also replacing its existing desktop controller app for Mac and Windows with a web app that offers the same functionality and design as on your phone. That’s probably a good decision, as the Sonos controller doesn’t seem to be consistent with the company’s current design and feature set, although I’m sure some will bristle at the fact that it’s a web app. The rollout is also scheduled to begin on May 7th and the existing Mac and Windows app will be retired at some point.
I bet that for a lot of people the Sonos app will still be a “set it and forget it” thing that you set up speakers and then tuck away in case something goes wrong. For example, if you only have one or two speakers and listen almost exclusively through Spotify, you’re probably better off just continuing to use the Spotify app itself. But people who have a more elaborate speaker setup and use multiple audio sources should find a lot to like here when the app launches in a few weeks.