Courage? (Premium)

The other day, lashed out at Sonos for the poor quality of its new app. But I should have waited. It's much worse than I thought.

As I noted at the time, I should have known better: The Sonos mobile app has long been the Achilles Heel of this otherwise excellent smart speaker ecosystem. I only use it when I have to, as it's not possible to directly control Sonos speakers using the YouTube Music app.

My issues with the now-previous Sonos app, which used to be called Sonos S2 to differentiate it from the legacy Sonos S1 app, were many. But all I was hoping for with this upgrade was the basics: A more elegant way to control the Now Playing queue.I want to easily add songs to the queue (Play next, Add to queue), remove songs from the queue, rearrange songs from the queue, and the like.

That I even have to type that out is indicative of how terrible this app is. Or, was. Because that app that I hated so much has been replaced by a new app. That, incredibly, I hate even more.

I will say this. The new Sonos app is prettier than its predecessor, with a more modern user experience. It will be more bearable when it works better, but the new app—in both mobile and web app forms, they're built on the same code base—is definitely a visual improvement.

I noted in my previous article on this topic that the web app would almost immediately crash, and that was true for me, no matter which web browser I use on which platform. The issue, I discovered, was that the "Recently played" section would never successfully load, and that somehow crashed the page. You can see that here:

So I worked around that by scrolling past that section or navigating to a different page. Once I did that, the web app worked OK. And looking at it today, I can see that "Recently played" now loads correctly. So there's one problem solved, I guess.

But there are other problems. Many other problems, including some functional regressions—features from the S2 app that are missing in the new version—that really upset the user base. The Sonos subreddit is full of complaints, many of which contain long lists of issues and missing features.

But my single biggest issue with this app is rather incredible. Remember how I wanted Sonos to make it easier to make basic changes to Now Playing? Sonos didn't do that. Instead, Sonos removed those features entirely. It's not possible to remove a song from Now Playing. It's not possible to change the position of a song in Now Playing. It's not possible to add a song to Now Playing, not after the currently playing song and not at the end of the queue. All you can do is replace the queue with something else (a song, a playlist, whatever).

This is so incredible I doubted myself. I mean, come on. This is media player 101 stuff. Obviously, you can edit Now Playing. I must just be missing something.

Nope. I've confirmed across the Android, iPhone, iPad, and web versions of the new Sonos app that there is no way to perform these...