Sonos Starts Adding Features Back to its App

After disappointing customers with its horrible new app, Sonos has started adding back some of the features it was missing at launch. But it will likely be another month before this new app has all the features from the previous version.

“Many of you have shared valuable feedback on both the improvements that have made your experience better, as well as the areas where we fell short,” a Sonos representative explains in the company’s support forum. “We are listening to all your comments and working to address them as quickly as possible. Over the coming weeks, we will reintroduce [missing] features, while fixing bugs and performance issues. Thank you for your engagement, and we look forward to building upon this first step to create a listening experience that meets everyone’s needs.”

Last week, Sonos issued an app update that adds support for the newly released Sonos Roam 2 mini-speaker and addresses several of the complaints its customers expressed. Key among them, it added back previously missing features like local music library playback and search for Alarm and improved VoiceOver and TalkBack, two key accessibility features.

These updates don’t address my central issue, which is the app’s inability to edit the Now Playing queue. But that feature is coming back in early June, Sonos now says. And then in mid-June, the company will bring back features like Sleep Timer and local music library search, improve navigation for visually impaired customers, and update the Wi-Fi settings interface. A final missing feature, Snooze Alarms, is currently listed as “TBD.”

It’s still unclear whether the uproar over this terrible app, which this time is justified, will impact Sonos in any way. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, however, as this is a big year for the company, with its recently released Sonos Ace headphones marking the start of a dramatic expansion of its product offerings.