News Sonos is still trying to figure out why everyone hates its app

[News]

Sonos chief innovation officer Nick Millington says in an update published yesterday that he and his team are “100% focused” on understanding and addressing issues with the Sonos app. It’s the latest in a series of Millington’s posts sharing his team’s progress as it tries to restore features that were left out of the app’s controversial redesign in May last year.

Here’s what Millington, the original Sonos system architect who is tasked with fixing the app, has to say about the effort:

The team and I remain 100% focused on two important priorities:

1. understanding the root cause of every single customer issue, whether big or small, whether common or rare, and making sure the technical performance of the app meets or exceeds what you have come to expect from Sonos.

2. closing gaps in the functionality and usability of the new app relative to what you enjoyed before, in a priority order that is as responsive as possible to the feedback we receive from you.
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Millington says users who have shared diagnostic information have “sharpened” the team’s focus, leading to several improvements. In previous updates on the page going back to October, he has promised several features were on their way, such as alarm snoozing, better queue management, and playlist editing. He points out that you can once again snooze alarms, and says users can check the battery of portable Sonos Move and Roam speakers when they’re in standby.

But the work has been slow-going and Sonos still hasn’t added playlist editing back, nor the ability for a user to queue an entire folder from their local music library. According to Millington, both are on their way in “upcoming releases.”