Sonos' big beta app update finally adds a feature I've been wanting for months
Precision is everything, but this beta makes a wide array of tweaks
If there's one thing that Sonos knows right now, it's that it absolutely cannot mess up another app update. The debacle of its new app still haunts the audio brand a couple of years on, which explains why its latest big update has been more carefully tested and deliberately launched than any other I can remember.
If you're on the latest version of the Sonos app you can now test it out before it goes live for everyone at some point down the line, and I activated it to see what it offers up. The option is called "Enable Improved Navigation" in the Settings menu if you're keen to see it for yourself.
There are indeed subtle tweaks to a lot the navigation methods through the app, with more pages now letting you swipe them down or backwards to return to previous screens, which should make things more intuitive.
I really like that I can now sort my systems and order them as I like, rather than just in the order they were set up, and being able to mark my TV system as a favourite to pin it to the top is also a nice time saver.
Impressively, though, it's an incredibly tiny change that I'm loving the most, because I know I'll be glad of it every day from now on. For a long while, adjusting the volume of my TV system during playback has been a bit imprecise – the volume line in the app spans a huge range of noise levels and can be hard to tweak super precisely.
I often have the TV on really low volumes, and that's been particularly the case with some of the recent late-night World Cup games, and it's been fiddly to get right. With this update, though, whenever you use that volume dial you'll now see a "+" and "-" sign on either side of it, letting you go up or down in the smallest possible increments.
This makes it far easier to quickly get to the exact level I want, and Sonos says that another must-have feature is also on the way – lock screen controls. That'll be another major quality of life win for me, as a daily user.
Sonos says that all these changes have been tested with community members in recent months, and that this opt-in test is the latest phase before it all properly launches. That shows it's learned the lesson from its previous app mistakes, but we'll see what sort of feedback it gets in the coming weeks.
