Sonos announces a redesigned app that puts everything on your home screen

Today, Sonos is officially introducing the redesigned mobile app that it showed you earlier this month. It'll be rolling out for both Android and iOS on May 7, but the company's desktop apps won't be coming in handy: Sonos will discontinue its control apps for Windows and macOS in the near future. In their place is a new web app that lets you control and access your Sonos speakers from anywhere — not just when you're at home via Wi-Fi.

But for now, let's get back to the smartphone app. It has been rebuilt from the ground up to be even more reliable. Sonos' primary goal was to make everything feel faster and get you where you want to be without Rely on the tabbed navigation bar. Now, it's all on the home screen, and you can customize the layout to put your favorite playlists at the top. Want to put your audio source louder than anything else? You can do that too. You can pin specific carousels from music apps (such as Spotify's “New Releases”) to the home screen, too. And there's a persistent search bar at the bottom, so finding music is always just one click away.

Accessing the speakers is as simple as swiping up from the small launcher at the bottom of the app. From there, you'll see a system overview where you can adjust the volume, group products, etc. If you need to dig deeper, there's a shortcut to the Settings menu in the top-right corner of the home screen.

The search experience is mostly the same, although you can now set a preferred music service that will rank at the top of the results. Unfortunately for Apple Music users, Sonos still doesn't rank 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 7 to see if there are any missing features or functionality compared to the current version. Nothing frustrates Sonos fans more than this kind of thing, so hopefully there won't be too many holes to fill. I'm looking forward to testing out the web app and seeing how well I can control Sonos devices from afar; This convenience was previously exclusive to the company's Sonos Pro subscription service. Desktop apps were already getting a bit of attention as it is, so maybe this is for the best.

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

The new Sonos app will be released as a software update for the S2 and will support all of the same products.