Things I hate about the Sonos desktop app
Thu Jul 08 2021
It's easy to pick holes in something from the sidelines, blissfully unaware of any constraints that the people working on that thing might have been working under.
But it's also fun. So with the aforementioned caveats applied, I'm going to do it anyway.
Oh, Sonos desktop app, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways... #
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When you start the app, it doesn't remember what you were listening to the last time, so you're forced into the clunky source selection menu straight off, every time, before you can listen to anything.
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The annoying title text that appears when you hover over an item that is a) pointless, because it just duplicates the text that's on the screen anyway, and b) then gets in the way of reading the text that you're hovering.
- The repetitious and redundant labelling when you have no source selected. I get it, I haven't selected anything yet. You don't need to tell me in quintuplicate.
- When you have selected a source, the play control icons are unlabelled, irritatingly tiny and they look fuzzy on a retina display. The Repeat/Repeat With a Dot/Repeat With a Dot and a Blob icon is particularly baffling.
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This thing that look like a play/pause control, but isn't actually in any way interactive, and shows the opposite of what the actual play control shows
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This whole panel that basically doesn't do anything, apart from this mystifying icon that is apparently how you control which speakers you're sending audio to
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The play button has no touch, focus or "playing" state, so you get novisual feedback at all that touching the button has done anything at all.
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The delay when you click play, when nothing appears to be happening, so you hit play again, but it starts playing a fraction of a second before you do, so you're actually pausing it
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There's no way to search within a particular music source. You just have to search across all of them, and them try and guess how the thing you want has been categorised (is it in Podcasts & Shows? or Episodes? or Shows? 🙃)