Sonos will stop playing local files on Android devices later this month

Most people are drawn to Sonos because of its wide sound flow options, but it’s also possible to play your audio files via line input, Bluetooth, AirPlay, and network attached storage (NAS). Android users have always had another option: they can easily play audio files stored locally on their devices via the Sonos system at full quality. But that last option will soon fade away.

Sonos has it Updated their website with notice which states, “Beginning May 23, 2023, we will remove the ability to play audio files directly to Sonos using the ‘On this device’ menu in the Sonos app for Android.” The company is recommending that customers either upload these tracks to a streaming service — YouTube Music is great for this — or get a NAS solution up and running if they want local files to remain playable on their Sonos devices.

Timing is quite a thing, though it was almost certainly coincidental. Sonos and Google are currently facing off in federal court over patent infringement. But I think the On This Device feature has been used so little that the company has deemed it not worth keeping it anymore. Sonos Removing the equivalent feature on iOS Three years ago, it was said at the time that “the way this feature was originally designed has become unreliable with newer versions of iOS and Sonos” and that the company’s support for AirPlay made it redundant.

The logic seems similar to Android. “As newer versions of mobile operating systems are released, the way information is shared between devices can sometimes change, and this feature will not be compatible with newer versions of the Android operating system,” a Sonos representative wrote. In the company’s support forums.

With so many Bluetooth-enabled speakers now on the market and having expanded the line’s operation to the recent Era 100 and Era 300 products, Sonos seems to think its bases are covered by local files, even if they can’t be streamed to the platform directly from Android anymore. . Keep in mind that you can play music via Bluetooth to a Roam or Era speaker and then pass that audio on to the other Sonos speakers that are part of your system. But if you don’t want to lose any audio fidelity, your best options are a line-in or NAS drive.