Sonos app fix lands in two weeks after 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 troubled 2024 redesign that triggered widespread complaints from speaker owners.

The company announced the release on Reddit and described it as a significant update. The new version will rework navigation, device sorting, and volume controls on iPhone. Sonos says the app will get a new tab layout, with the selected section more clearly highlighted, and that Home, System, and Search will be easier to find. Users will also be able to turn on the redesigned navigation manually through Enable Improved Navigation in settings.

Day-to-day usability appears to be the bigger focus. Users will be able to choose how speakers are ordered:

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• 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 avoid scrolling through long room and zone lists when switching music quickly.

On iOS, Sonos is also redesigning the volume slider. It will become dynamic, and numeric values will appear alongside it for more precise control.

What went wrong with the Sonos app in 2024

By the time Sonos rolled out its fully redesigned app in May 2024, the software had become far more than a simple remote for speakers. It handled room grouping, streaming, home theater control, and speaker updates. When the launch went wrong, the failure hit the whole system at once.

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Users complained not just about bugs. For some customers, playback broke. Others lost track queues, local libraries, and alarm settings. Sonos spent months restoring features in stages and publicly apologized for the state of the release.

The fallout extended 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. The leadership change was about more than one app, but the software failure became the clearest sign that the brand had lost control of the user experience.

That matters because Sonos is competing not only with Bose and Bluesound, but also with the ecosystems of Apple, Amazon, and Google, where music control is already tightly built into phones, voice assistants, and home automation. Sonos sells hardware at prices well above mass-market smart speakers, which leaves little room for software missteps. If this rollout happens without major problems, it will give the company its strongest case yet for users who stopped updating automatically after 2024.