Sonos Quietly Just Gave Its New App a Small But Welcome Upgrade

By now, Sonos’s recent app troubles are well documented.

The beloved home audio company launched its new mobile app back in mid-2014, and almost instantly, people hated it. It was slow, way different to navigate, and stripped away a variety of features that many of Sonos’s most ardent fans loved. (And those are just the Spark Notes.)

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

The fallout was pretty extreme. Sonos had to push all hardware releases until the foreseeable future — the Era 100 Pro, which isn’t designed for consumers, was its 2025 release — and Patrick Spence had to step down as CEO.

And then this past March, Sonos’s Chief Innovation Officer, Nick Millington, released a blog post titled “The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates” that stated progress on fixing the app, as well as a list of upcoming priorities.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

But, after all the damage control, things have started to look up for Sonos. It’s very active in the r/Sonos subreddit — thanks to “KeithFromSonos” — issuing updates, responding to criticism and answering questions … which hasn’t gone unnoticed by its fans.

And it regularly rolls out firmware updates to its app and has restored several features that were lost, such as the ability to snooze an alarm.

In fact, Sonos just rolled out a firmware update this week that adds new music library controls for Android users.

New firmware and music controls

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

In its App Release Notes, Sonos states that “Albums can now be grouped by Compilations or Album Artist (or left ungrouped), and folders can be sorted by Song Name, Song Number, or File Name.”

These same app updates were rolled out for iPhone owners back in late October.

To access these features, the Sonos app on your smartphone should be running version 80.34.40 (Android) or 80.34.37 (iOS). These apps are rolled out over several days, so you may not receive the update or feature immediately.

To stay on top of the latest software updates, you can check out Sonos’s support page. The company updates it with every new firmware release, which is at least once a month.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add Gear Patrol as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

Related Topics