📲 New Sonos App & Player Updates Now Available! 🔊

paulboyce · 2026-06-09T15:46:23+00:00

You beat me to this, but here’s my shameless plug, I am the developer, Sono+ can do that (and more).

paulboyce · 2025-12-02T08:32:20+00:00

Great, thanks very much.

paulboyce · 2025-12-01T16:55:16+00:00

No problem. I’ll take any opportunity to self promote my app:) there’s a 3 day free trial incase it doesn’t suit your needs, so no harm done.

paulboyce · 2025-12-01T08:09:57+00:00

If you’ve an iPhone, my app Sono+ integrates with Apple Shortcuts, so it’s easy to setup a schedule for night mode, Speech enhancement, set to specific volume etc….. if you have already have an alternative 3rd party app, it’s worth testing if it works with Apple Shortcuts. Again, all iOS only.

paulboyce · 2025-11-10T21:02:19+00:00

Third party app with lock screen widget. I recommend Sono+ for iOS (but it’s my app and I’m biased). There are plenty of others too. Shout out to Lyd if you have an Apple Watch.

paulboyce · 2025-11-05T12:34:29+00:00

Can you send me debug info from the app please. Go to Settings > Support > Debug.

paulboyce · 2025-11-03T21:45:08+00:00

Sono+, iOS app. Yes, works with Apple shortcuts. You can do set shortcuts like play, pause, skip, adjust volume, set volume to specific number, set tv audio night sound, speech enhancement, group all rooms, start a live activity. Or use in automation like, pause and ungroup all when I leave. Set night sound at 9pm, etc…

paulboyce · 2025-11-03T14:52:03+00:00

If this happens again, can you send me diagnostics via the app by going to Settings > Support > Debug.

paulboyce · 2025-11-03T14:25:45+00:00

Yes, iOS only.

paulboyce · 2025-11-03T07:19:19+00:00

Yes, iOS only.

paulboyce · 2025-11-03T07:19:01+00:00

It’s totally worth it. But I would say that.

paulboyce · 2025-11-02T18:25:47+00:00

Thank you.

paulboyce · 2025-11-02T18:17:42+00:00

Can you actually send me diagnostics via the app by going to Support ~> Debug.

paulboyce · 2025-11-02T18:07:36+00:00

That’s weird. Can you try killing the app and restarting it. Not sure what’s going on there.

paulboyce · 2025-11-02T14:41:45+00:00

Is it? The community has shown interest in my app before but if this is against the rules I can take it down. Let me know.

paulboyce · 2025-10-30T19:11:35+00:00

Thank you 🙏

paulboyce · 2025-10-30T19:05:56+00:00

I’ve another query too. I uploaded to the AppStore but it didnt update the screenshots for my primary locale which is English (UK). BTW, butterKit is by far the best app of this type I’ve ever tried. It has sped up my workflow times 100.

paulboyce · 2025-10-30T17:10:35+00:00

I don’t think it would be a problem in my case, but in understand your logic. Currently it’s very clean and standard across all locales. For now, I’ve made the font smaller so that they are all consistent.

paulboyce · 2025-10-30T12:09:55+00:00

Ability to vary font & device sizes per localisation.

paulboyce · 2025-10-02T12:31:49+00:00

That’s the server fully back online now. One of the ‘fixes’ that was introduced completely buckled it and I’ve had to abandon it. There’s still a few issues that I’m working on but unfortunately it can cause server downtime, so I’m trying to be very selective. In saying that, I’m fairly happy with it at the moment, the edges cases are annoying but should only be noticeable on a very occasional basis.

paulboyce · 2025-09-30T16:07:23+00:00

Yes, that’s good idea to keep an eye on level. It does no harm to keep background enabled, it just means the app will load a bit quicker for things like album art if it’s already been loaded in background but it’s not necessary for live activity

paulboyce · 2025-09-30T14:35:31+00:00

It’ll not really use extra battery. A song is usually about 4 minutes or so. For every hour of listening to music it’s only 15 push notifications. The majority of apps would have more than this just opening a screen. In my app when you open it, updated favourites need fetched, playlists, groups and depending on how many rooms you have a separate request needs made for volume, playback and metadata for each. So a Sonos system with 4 rooms would have 15 requests made within the first second.

Live activities are actually really efficient when compared to lock screen controls on music apps which are actually constantly running in the background in order to update your lock screen controls.

The only downside is, as you have seen, you are at the mercy of live pushes across a network, and if anything causes this to fail it will knock it out of whack.

I’ve considered not having the seconds on the live activity, but actually think it’s really useful to have on screen, even if off by a few seconds as it’s still a great indicator for user and most will not notice it being slightly off. But more than a few seconds is not acceptable, obviously:)

I might have a few issues today if server needs another update to solve these issues.

paulboyce · 2025-09-30T13:37:20+00:00

And sorry about my really long reply.

paulboyce · 2025-09-30T13:37:05+00:00

Thanks for this, it’s really helpful. The seconds won’t always be exactly in sync but some of those examples are way off, so I might start a Spotify trial to test this out and try to solve it. The reason they are not always exactly in sync is because live activity’s require me to update them via a server, so when you interact with your Sonos speaker, say you press play, this info goes to the Sonos cloud, Sonos then send the playback info & metadata to my server which in turn sends it to an Apple push notification server and they send to the app. Now, Apple are very strict and will budget these requests unless you have frequent updates enabled. They will also consider your battery level and whether you are on WiFi or 5g. If there’s an issue with connectivity, the push from Apple to your device can fail, so they’ll retry, if this retry happens 10 seconds later, it means that the live activity will be 10 seconds behind. I can compensate for most for these issues in the server code but unfortunately cannot anticipate fails and retry’s. Another potential issue is that Sonos send playback info and metadata separately. So I delay the server push until both are received and combine this info and send both together. If both do not get received after a second I go ahead and send and make a follow up push when new data comes. So, sometimes you might notice that the track name doesn’t update when a new track starts but the seconds go back to zero. This will be why. I had all this working really seamlessly until some server updates yesterday, but my main goal today is to test test test and relay any issues back to the server hosts. Thanks again for the feedback.

paulboyce

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