Sonos announces biggest app redesign in 20 years with one Home screen and customisation

Normally an app redesign wouldn’t warrant a full-blown news story – it’s just an app after all – and apps get updated all the time. But the Sonos app has remained the same for a number of years with only minor tweaks here and there – until now. 

Sonos has announced an app redesign that is said to be its most extensive in the two decades the company has been dabbling in the multi-room audio arena. It doesn’t fix my greatest bug bear with the current app in that you still can’t control your Sonos system using the mobile app when you aren’t on your home Wi-Fi network, but there are some great changes coming.

How is the Sonos app changing?

Moving from five tabs across the bottom of the Sonos app screen, the new Sonos app will put everything into one Home screen, making accessing content and controls significantly easier than it has been in the past.

Divided into several rails, the Home screen will serve up your most recently played at the top, followed by the music streaming service you are signed into (you can pick a favourite), recommendations for Sonos Radio, and sources below that, such as a record player that you have connected to the line-in port on your Sonos Era 300, for example.

There’s a search bar too and this one is quite exciting as in the past, you had to define what you wanted to search when you went to the search tab on the Sonos app, whether that be song, artist, podcast or playlist. The search bar in the new Sonos app will search everything at once, serving up results in an orderly fashion and allowing you to click on ‘More’ to see the full list of results from songs to podcasts, or click out to the individual apps to see what they are offering up.

Swiping up from the bottom of the Home screen of the new Sonos app will serve up the Now Playing card, allowing you to not only see what you’re listening to, but you can also adjust volume and group speakers together more easily too. When you’re on the Home page in general, the Now Playing screen is still there, but in a mini format at the bottom providing easy access.

Elsewhere, there’s a gear icon in the top right for extra settings, but your entire Sonos system can still be accessed from the Home screen, whether you have a Sonos Era 100 on its own or a combination of different Sonos speakers and soundbars. Meanwhile, tap on the Sonos logo at the top when you’re in the search results or system settings, and you’ll get back to the main home page.

But, the most exciting thing about the Sonos app redesign isn’t necessarily the easier access to everything. It’s the fact that you can customise and reorder the Home screen to your preferences and this happens on a device-by-device basis. For example, if you want Your Services to sit above Recently Played, you can jiggle them around to make that happen and that doesn’t then apply to your partner’s device too. You can also pin more specific content to a rail too, like radio on Spotify, for example. 

As I mentioned, you still can’t control your Sonos system through the mobile app when you aren’t at home on the same Wi-Fi network as your speakers. But, alongside the mobile app redesign, there is also a Sonos Web App that you can use to control your Sonos system from wherever you are and whatever browser you like to use.

When is the new Sonos app available and what speakers are compatible?

The new Sonos app will be available from 7 May. All speakers and soundbars that are compatible with the current Sonos app will remain compatible with the new Sonos app. 

The Sonos S1 app – which was replaced by the Sonos S2 app (now just called Sonos in the respective app stores) in August 2020 – will remain available in order to control older Sonos speakers that aren’t compatible with the newer app.