Sonos promises biggest app fix since 2024 backlash

Sonos says a major app update will reach all users within the next two weeks, marking its biggest attempt yet to recover from the company’s troubled 2024 redesign. After that overhaul, Sonos owners flooded the company with complaints about bugs, a contentious interface, and missing familiar features.

The company announced the release on Reddit and explicitly called it a major update. It will introduce a new tab layout, make the selected section stand out more clearly, and simplify Home, System, and Search so they are easier to find. Sonos also says the updated navigation can be turned on manually through the Enable Improved Navigation option in settings.

More important than the visual changes are the day-to-day controls. Users will be able to choose how speakers are sorted:

• alphabetically
• by frequency of use
• by what is currently playing

Devices can also be pinned to the top of the list, making it easier to jump between rooms and zones without scrolling through a long setup.

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On iPhone, Sonos is also reworking volume controls. The volume slider will become dynamic, and numerical values will appear alongside it for more precise adjustment.

The 2024 Sonos app failure

By now, the Sonos app does far more than act as a remote for speakers. It is used to group devices by room, start streaming, manage home theater setups, and update the speakers themselves. So when Sonos rolled out a fully reworked app in May 2024, the failure affected the whole system rather than a single feature.

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Users reported not just bugs, but broken playback, missing track queues, vanished local libraries, and lost alarm settings. Sonos spent months restoring features in pieces and publicly apologized for the state of the release.

The fallout reached beyond forums and comment sections. After the failed launch, Sonos had to answer to investors and rework its update roadmap. In early 2025, Tom Conrad took over the company, replacing Patrick Spence. That leadership change was not only about the app, but the software failure became the clearest sign that Sonos had lost control of the user experience.

That is especially risky for a brand competing not just with Bose and Bluesound, but with the ecosystems of Apple, Amazon, and Google, where music controls are already built into phones, voice assistants, and home automation. Sonos sells hardware at prices well above mass-market smart speakers, and its customers expect basic stability—not surprises after an update. The real test will come quickly once the rollout begins.