Sonos is returning features left behind by its "courageous" app redesign

Sonos is returning features left behind by its "courageous" app redesign

After weeks of getting yelled at from all corners of the Internet, Sonos is finally relinquishing and making changes to the recently overhauled mobile app. 

In May, Sonos should be used by customers to control Sonos speakers, soundbars and home theater sets if you are not following along Sonos Moba

The idea from Sonos during the update was to streamline the app."

When the overhauled app update started on 5/7, there was an immediate backlash and it has continued unabated ever since. The biggest complaint was that Sonos sliced through a lot of features and slimmed down the others. 

As a Sonos user, I didn't think the local music library was great, but they got tremendously worse. Somehow I feel that the search is less intuitive than the previous S2 version. This is especially terrible because Sonos has taken away the ability to edit playlists and queues for upcoming songs. 

Obviously, accessibility features have also been either completely broken or significantly reduced.

Other features such as sleep timer and alarm have been completely removed. Users have complained to Reddit, Sonos' contact email and X. 

The initial response of Sonos was not very good. Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, Chief Product Officer, said: "The redesign of the Sonos app is an ambitious initiative that represents just how seriously we are committed to inventing and reinventing. It takes courage to rebuild the brand's core products from scratch, and it may need to take a few steps to finally make the leap into the future.

Once again, Sonos' courage did not work. It tried to answer questions about the process of designing a new app and why they were missing features and accessibility At the Sonos Forum's AMA last week, multiple Sonos representatives tried to explain the decision.

"This is a new app - I started from an empty project file. As the project progressed, we stopped investing time in old app code. Over time, we "crossfade" our engineering attention to the new app. We will stop splitting our attention because we need to make a new app an upcoming app," said Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management.

This week, Sonos announced updates and improvements to many of the features affected. It is said that accessibility features such as VoiceOver and TalkBack have been improved. Also, an alarm has been added back.

The company announced that the sleep timer, which has been added to the queue and playlist changes, will not arrive until May. 

As a Sonos user, the updated Android app was very slow. Telling the speaker to search or play a song also takes multiple seconds to load. Here's what the Sonos app's home screen looks like now:

It may take some time for Sonos customers to trust the company. Multiple threads of the main subreddit are about rolling back updates that iOS users can't actually do, but Android users can get around it

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