New Sonos App is Coming May 7

Sonos announced today that it will issue a major overhaul of its woeful mobile app on May 7, and it appears to address many of the most obvious complaints. Also notable, Sonos will retire its native Mac and Windows apps and replace them with a more modern and capable web app.

“We felt now was the time to reimagine our app experience,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said. “After thorough development and testing, we are confident this redesigned app is easier, faster, and better. It once again raises the bar for the home music listening experience, and sets up our ability to expand into new categories and experiences.”

I love Sonos and am deeply invested in its ecosystem of smart speakers, but its mobile app has always been its Achilles Heel. This is especially problematic for me when I use Android smartphones: While you can control Sonos speakers using your favorite music app via Airplay on an iPhone or iPad, only a few services, like Spotify, support doing so on Android. And thanks to their ongoing legal battles, Google doesn’t support this in YouTube Music, the service I prefer and use. So I’m stuck with the crappy Sonos app.

Well, according to Sonos, it’s about to get a lot less crappy.

The new Sonos app is simpler and cleaner, and it appears to be more user-friendly. It dispenses with the bottom tab bar and puts everything you need on its home screen. There, you can fully customize the layout, putting the items you need the most—like favorite playlists, services, and suggestions—up top. And a new mini-player on the bottom—similar to the native notification sheet-based Now Playing experiences in iOS and Android—lets you easily access your speakers and groups.

That all solves the “whack-a-mole” problems that Sonos users face today, but I’m curious if it solves my biggest issues with this app. For starters, the Now Playing experience requires multiple taps to rearrange, add, and remove songs, whereas other apps let you do that in-place. And Sonos only lets users create and edit Sonos-based playlists; I don’t want these locked into Sonos, I want them in my music service of choice. (One issue: You can’t currently access Sonos playlists on the go, and I use my phone for music, like everyone else.)

For now, it’s unclear. The cross-service search feature seems to work as before, and that’s a nice perk of the Sonos ecosystem. But you can now prioritize the service(s) you prefer for the search results, which is absolutely an improvement. (Let’s just say that YouTube Music is never the top result today.) I don’t see anything about playlists, beyond this quote that suggests maybe this isn’t changing.

“Today’s streaming experience has become fragmented across multiple platforms due to varied content offerings, algorithmic curation, or simply the desire to not recreate playlists in multiple locations,” Sonos Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin says. “As the only audio brand with an open platform offering extensive choice, Sonos makes it easy to control your system and curate your favorite sounds all in one place. Our reimagined app delivers the industry’s most streamlined streaming experience by bringing a world of content and intuitive control to the Home screen.”

Sonos will soon launch its first headphones, so the company will have to address the on-the-go scenario. The question is whether it will do so globally, or just for its own headphones. We’ll see. Either way, it’s still an improvement.

The new Sonos app for Android, iPhone, and iPad will replace the current Sonos S2 app. That and the new cross-platform web app, which offers identical functionality, will be available May 7. I can’t wait.