The Sonos app has long been a source of frustration for many users, with its cluttered interface and lack of intuitiveness. But Sonos has listened to its customers and is set to release a totally new app on May 7th, one that promises to be a major improvement.
Sonos VP of user experience and user research, Neil Griffiths, said that the redesign came as a result of talking to hundreds of customers about their listening habits and the way they want to use the app. From those conversations came two principles that the company followed for the new app.
One was to make it easier for people to play back whatever audio content they have, whether it’s streaming music, podcasts, radio, audiobooks, devices plugged into Sonos speakers like TVs or turntables and more. The second is making the app into a hub that’s better-suited to getting to exactly what you want to hear.
The end result is a much simpler app — the old one had the usual five tabs along the bottom, three of which could be used to find music. Now, there’s a single, customizable home screen with a persistent search bar and rows of content. By default, you’ll see a “recently played” section at the top that pulls things in from any service you use; below that you’ll see a carousel of the different services you have hooked up to Sonos.
There’s also an area that controls different inputs, like line-in to speakers that support it or TVs plugged into soundbars. That way, you can tap those to switch between streaming music and playing back the connected device.
But easily the best thing about this new app is the customizable home screen. Not only can you change the order of things that appear there, you can also pin content directly from within different apps so you can get to it immediately. For example, Spotify, Apple Music and basically every other music service typically have a “new releases for you” section that shows recent albums based on your listening habits. If you always want to see that, you can pin it straight to your home screen and it’ll dynamically update when Spotify has new picks.
I can easily see pinning a half-dozen lists from different apps to my home screen, which will make the process of starting music from the Sonos app itself a lot more fluid.
Sonos also made it easier to jump right into the service of your choice. All of the streaming apps that you’re logged in to will appear in a carousel as well, with your default / favorite option always at the beginning of the list. The same goes for search — when you open the search bar and type something in, you’ll get the results from your favorite service first.
For a lot of people, I wager the Sonos app will still be a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, used to get speakers set up and then tucked away in case something goes wrong. But people who have a more involved speaker setup and use multiple sources for audio should find a lot to like here when the app arrives in a few weeks.
