Summary
- The revamped Sonos app has been heavily criticized for missing features.
- With the latest update, the app gets a sleep timer and basic queue management options.
- The company is working on addressing user feedback and has promised future enhancements with better playback controls and local music library search.
Sonos rolled out a major revamp of its companion mobile app last month. Despite claims that the new app is “faster, easier, better,” existing Sonos customers criticized its lack of basic features like sleep timers and music library search. Following the backlash, Sonos’ chief product officer defended the courageous redesign, though he ceded to the possibility of taking a few steps back for future advancements. Within weeks of the redesign going live, Sonos rolled out an app update to marginally improve the user experience. Two weeks later, the Sonos app is getting another update that adds features like sleep timers.
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Shortly after facing heavy criticism for the new Sonos app, the company began soliciting feedback from users regarding missing features and issues. Subsequently, it provided a timeline for all planned improvements and when users could expect them.
True to its words, the latest Sonos app update adds some of the missing features as previously detailed, including a sleep timer and “play next” and “add to end of queue” buttons. It also adds support for the company’s new Sonos Ace headphones.
You can find the full release notes of Sonos v80.02.05 (Android) below:
In this update:
- Added support for the all new Sonos Ace headphones
- Added sleep timer settings
- Added “play next” and “add to end of queue”
- Improved Home Feed scrolling
- Improved setup reliability
- Added WiFi configuration for products with BLE
- Improved battery consumption for Bluetooth discovery
- Improved ability to update older firmware systems
- Further improved navigation for visually-impaired customers
- Added VoiceOver support to read toast message automatically on iOS
- Introduced mute button on iOS
- Improved local library connectivity
- Improved Trueplay setup on iOS
- Added distance settings for surrounds
- Added line-out settings for Sonos Port
Sonos’ ‘courageous’ new app still needs a lot of work
While these feature improvements are welcome, there are still a lot of issues Sonos needs to tackle with its redesigned app. There’s still no way to rearrange items in a queue, which is an incomprehensible omission from a companion music app in this day and age. The Sonos app team has confirmed that they are working on bringing back volume level indicators, though they can’t share its tentative release timeline.
Additionally, as per the timeline shared by the team, the Sonos app should get another update in June that will add better playback controls, local music library search and playback, and more.
It is good to see Sonos working on rapidly reintroducing all the missing basic features from its redesigned app. But it would have been even better if the company had thought of this beforehand and ran a beta program to take user feedback.
