The New Sonos App is a Dumpster Fire. Of Course It Is (Premium)

I have long supported Sonos as a customer and fan, but I’ve always been clear that this company’s mobile app is garbage, the Achilles Heel of its ecosystem. And so I was naturally looking forward to the “reimagined” new Sonos mobile and web apps that the company promised. And I was just as naturally disappointed in the results, though history should have been my guide: The new Sonos app is a dumpster fire. Of course it is.

I bought my first Sonos smart speaker, a white Sonos Play:1, in September 2015 and was so happy with the results that I bought a second unit to stereo-pair them in the living room of our house in Dedham. I even bought, modified, and installed triangular shelves for them so I could mount them in the corners of the room. Look at me being all DIY!

From there, my Sonos addiction was tempered only by their high prices. I purchased a third Sonos Play:1, this time in black, to enjoy elsewhere in the house, in December 2016. But that was it for a while. When we moved to a bigger home in Pennsylvania in 2017, I made do with a pair of Edifier self-powered speakers in the sunroom for a few years, but when Brad offered me a good deal on his year-old Sonos Play:5s, I couldn’t resist.

Those speakers were—and still are—so good that my resistance disappeared overnight, kicking off a massive expansion in our Sonos usage. Today, we have a Sonos Beam soundbar on our TV, a massive Sonos Sub paired to the Play:5s, a pair of Ikea Symfonisk bookshelf speakers in the kitchen, a Sonos Move in the bedroom (that comes outside with us a lot), a Sonos One in the main bathroom, the black Sonos Play:1 in the second bath, and a Sonos Roam in my office. We even have a Sonos Boost to make sure music playback doesn’t interfere with our Wi-Fi (or vice versa. I love Sonos. Even my wife, normally ambivalent about most technology, loves Sonos.

But love is an interesting thing. It’s rarely all-or-nothing, and anyone can find some fault, even in those things we love the most. But I was shielded from the dark underbelly of Sonos in the early days because I used Google Play Music. And boy, did I love Google Play Music. I moved to that service when Microsoft Groove—formerly Xbox Music, formerly Zune—wound down, and because I hated—and still hate–Spotify. Well, hate is a strong word. But I do not like Spotify, and I will not use Spotify.

There was a lot to like about Google Play Music, and a big part of it for me was that it allowed you to seamlessly combine your own ripped/downloaded music collection with Google’s cloud-based collection, and upload your songs for free. But there was more to it than that. I could control my Sonos speakers with Google Play Music. And it’s hard to overstate how important that is: That’s where my music collection was, and that was the user experience I knew and preferred. And it was seamlessly mated with the smart speaker system I used at home. It was a perfect partnership.

Until it wasn’t.

Google eventually announced that it would replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. And while this was controversial for quite a while—still is, in our “never forget” techie non-culture—there were two related upsides that I think still puts YouTube Music over the top today: YouTube Music members get YouTube Premium (with no ads) as part of the subscription, and you can add YouTube music videos to your music playlists, and they play as songs in YouTube Music. (Or as videos; it’s your choice on the fly.)

YouTube Music was a bit rough at first, but Google aggressively improved the user experience and I very much prefer it over Spotify, Apple Music, or any other music app or service. But there is one major issue for me: Unlike Google Play Music, you can’t use YouTube Music to control Sonos. And that forces me to use the Sonos app when I want to play music at home. And the Sonos app has always been garbage, as noted. Always.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way: Google and Sonos both claimed that YouTube Music control of Sonos was coming. But then Sonos sued Google for stealing its patented smart speaker technology, and the two companies aren’t partnering like they used to. And me and others like me are the collateral damage.

There is a workaround to this problem, but only if you use Apple devices: Sonos is compatible with AirPlay, so you can control the speakers that way, using YouTube Music or any other app. And that’s great, but I don’t always use an iPhone, and when I’m on Android, I lose that seamless ability to fire up a podcast on Sonos:One in the main bath, or chain multiple sets of speakers on music night.

But what I generally end up doing is sucking it up. And it’s not just music nights. Each time we’ve moved, and stupidly, we’ve moved twice in the past year, I’ve had to completely reset and recreate my Sonos setup because this app is so horrible. This app just doesn’t work. It doesn’t get the basics right.

And it doesn’t get the details right. For all the advantages of having an ecosystem that supports multiple services, where you can make playlists full of songs from different sources, there’s a corresponding disadvantage. In that case, the harsh reality is that those playlists are not portable, they only work at home when you’re connected to your Sonos system. You can’t listen to them when you’re out in the world, at the gym, perhaps, or on a plane. (That’s supposed to change, by the way. More on that in a moment.)

But my day-to-day issues with the Sonos app are about usability. About how tedious it is to edit a playlist you’re listening to, which might involving changing the order of songs, adding songs, removing songs, and so on. In YouTube Music, this is simple: You can drag songs in the queue, press and hold to play a song next, and so on. In Sonos, these all require additional steps. You have to “edit” the queue before you can rearrange songs, for example. I just want to use the app I use. It’s frustrating.

But I also want to believe. Which, when you think about it, is the type of rationalization a chump makes.

When Sonos announced it was reimagining its mobile app and releasing a new web app for desktop based on the same underlying code, I was cautiously optimistic. Actually, I was elated. And that’s the problem: I’ve been abused by this horrible app for so long that I fell for it. Like Sonos would ever get the first version of a new app right given its track record. In many ways, this is on me.

Sonos overhauled its apps because it’s planning to release a pair of over-the-ear headphones in the next month or so. And in case it’s not obvious, headphones that only work on your home Wi-Fi, as most Sonos speakers now require, are not viable as a product. (Tied to this, Sonos is working to cut the reliance of its portable speakers on your home Wi-Fi as well.) And that requires a bit of architectural change.

Of course, that wasn’t the focus of the new app announcement: Sonos doesn’t want to undercut current sales by pre-announcing new products that will work differently. And so the announcement focused instead on the user experience changes. This app would be simpler and cleaner. More user-friendly. It could only be all that.

But in using the new Sonos app over the past 24 hours or so—sorry, trying to use the new Sonos app—reality has crashed down hard. By which I mean, it doesn’t work. Like, at all. The web app crashes and is completely unusable. And the mobile app is just buggy enough that I can kick off music playback before speakers start dropping out and the app loses track of the groupings I’ve configured.

As I was writing that last sentence, I used the Sonos app to play music on the Move, and then I added the Sonos Play:5s. The music made the jump to the new speakers … and then stopped. And according to the app, the queue is now empty. What the hell, Sonos.

Going into this, I was hopeful that the new app would solve some of the usability issues I’ve raised over the years. But as it now stands, the new app doesn’t even work, so my usability concerns of the past are a luxury I can’t afford to even think about. Just getting content to play reliably is impossible.

Thank God I have AirPlay-compatible devices. And that the Sonos Beam on my TV doesn’t require the Sonos app. This thing is a complete clusterf#$k. And I’d love to know why anyone at Sonos thought it was OK to go live with this thing.

Shame.