Sound Experience Guidelines

At Sonos, we build great sound experiences designed for how people live in their homes. We want these experiences to be joyous, easy, and built for the whole family to enjoy. And of course, we want them to sound awesome.

Continuity of control

Modern music listening can be cumbersome. Listeners have so many options for content and control that the entire process can be more trouble than it's worth. Continuity of control is our remedy for this. Building on the Sonos Sound Platform, our partners can help us remove the barriers to enjoying music in the home. Listeners can start music with the tap of a button on the wall. They can skip to the next song with the Sonos app, and see what's playing on their TV.

Sonos listeners are no longer required to interact with their music and content in a single, predetermined way.

Your app or device, building on the Platform, can help Sonos tell the continuity of control story. This is a great opportunity, but also a great responsibility. Sonos prizes a simple, joyful experience with music and content above almost everything else. We want your contributions to the Sonos experience to be meaningful and positive.

Build the next great experience

We've thought about how sound is experienced in the home for over a decade now. These sound experience guidelines are our attempt to bring together all that learning in one place. They'll help you build experiences that are intuitive, predictable, and focused on the user. We hope you'll use these guidelines to build the next great experience that helps tell the Sonos story.

Create an integration

Throughout these guidelines, you'll see the words "app", "device", "integration", and "client" used interchangeably. The integration you build can be hardware-based, or all software. It can have a screen or only controls. We simply want you to build a great experience.

One final note: with few exceptions, you are not required to build any single experience detailed in these guidelines. For instance, your app doesn't have to show playback metadata. These guidelines exist so that if your device does build on an experience, you do it in a way that we think is positive and meaningful.