Sonos announces redesigned app that puts everything on your homescreen

Today, Sonos is officially introducing the redesigned mobile app that I showed you earlier this month. It’ll roll out for both Android and iOS on May 7th, but the company’s desktop apps aren’t coming along for the ride: Sonos will discontinue its controller apps for Windows and macOS in the near future. Taking their place is a new web app that will allow you to control and access your Sonos speakers from anywhere — not just when you’re home on Wi-Fi.

But for now, let’s get back to the smartphone app. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up to be more reliable. Sonos’ fundamental goal was making everything feel faster and getting you where you want to be without relying on a tabbed navigation bar. Now, everything is on the homescreen, and you can customize the layout to put your favorite playlists up top. Want your line-in audio source positioned higher than everything else? You can do that, too. There’s a persistent search bar at the bottom, so finding music is always just a single tap away.

Accessing your speakers is as simple as swiping up from the mini player at the bottom of the app. From there, you’ll see a system overview where you can adjust volume, group products, and so on. If you need to dig deeper, there’s a shortcut to the settings menu in the upper-right corner of the homescreen.

The search experience is mostly the same, though you can now set a preferred music service that will be ranked at the top of results. Unfortunately for Apple Music users, Sonos still isn’t labeling spatial audio tracks in search results; you won’t see that badge until you start playing something.

So far, I’ve only seen a brief demo of the app in action, so we’ll have to wait until May 7th to learn whether there are any missing features or lost functionality compared to the current version. Nothing frustrates Sonos fans more than that sort of thing, so hopefully there won’t be many holes to plug. I’m looking forward to testing out the web app and seeing how well Sonos devices can be controlled from afar; that convenience was previously exclusive to the company’s Sonos Pro subscription service. The desktop apps were already receiving little attention as is, so this is probably for the best.

As you might imagine, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence seems very excited about the new mobile app. “We felt now was the time to reimagine our app experience,” he said in a press release. “After thorough development and testing, we are confident this redesigned app is easier, faster and better. It once again raises the bar for the home music listening experience, and sets up our ability to expand into new categories and experiences.”

The new Sonos app will roll out as an update to that S2 software and support all the same products.