To say that Sonos has had a rough start to its app redesign would be an understatement. The company called the major changes "courageous," but it seems most dedicated users would call the update "annoying" at best. Thankfully, the company appears to be walking back some of its controversial changes, including adding some no-brainer features back into the app.
In a Reddit thread, a Sonos employee is keeping a log of the app's updates. They said the app was "Updated to contain fixes added in today's software and firmware updates" on June 4.
The biggest feature added to the app with this update is a sleep timer. It seems absurd that sleep time was removed from the Sonos app in the first place, but at least the company listened to its users and brought the feature back as quickly as possible.
With these changes, the app is starting to look and function more like it did before the huge May update. Generally, you want an app update to move things forward, but it seems this one left Sonos scrambling just to get its software back to where it was.
Apparently, the introduction of the Sonos Ace headphones prompted some of the changes. Still, for longtime Sonos users who just wanted to use their speakers the way they always have, that doesn't really make the changes any less annoying.
Here's the complete changelog for the Sonos app's June 4 update:
- Added support for the all new Sonos Ace headphones
- Added sleep timer settings
- Added “play next” and “add to end of queue”
- Improved Home Feed scrolling
- Improved setup reliability
- Added WiFi configuration for products with BLE
- Improved battery consumption for Bluetooth discovery
- Improved ability to update older firmware systems
- Further improved navigation for visually-impaired customers
- Added VoiceOver support to read toast message automatically on iOS
- Introduced mute button on iOS
- Improved local library connectivity
- Improved Trueplay setup on iOS
- Added distance settings for surrounds
- Added line-out settings for Sonos Port
While the sleep timer's return is the main event, there are some other notable updates that should make Sonos users happy. The Sonos employee on Reddit also provided a timeline for future updates:
- Continued improvements to navigation for visually-impaired customers: mid-June
- Playback controls including mute and volume numbers: June
- Local music library search and playback: mid-June
- Improved playback settings including Play Now: July
- Create and edit local music library: July
- Improved Autoplay settings: July
- Improved Sub audio settings with Amp: July
- Snooze alarms: TBD
It seems that Sonos has a good plan in place to make things right for its loyal users, though it's still baffling that these changes happened in the first place.
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