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If you have a question about Somos InControl, you’re in the right place. These are the questions users ask most often, covering everything from how the app connects to your speakers to what it does (and doesn’t) do with your data. If your question isn’t answered here, head to Troubleshooting for step-by-step fixes, or contact support directly.
This is the question people ask most. A few things to know:
  • Set every speaker up in the Sonos® app first. A speaker still at factory settings, never added to your Sonos® system, can’t be set up from Somos. Once Sonos® knows it, Somos can bond it.
  • Fronts go on as a matched pair, both or neither. Choose standalone speakers, or choose an existing stereo pair and confirm that Somos may split it. Speakers grouped or bonded elsewhere must be released first. See Speaker Setup.
  • The old layout comes back. Somos now stages the setup: fronts first, then Sub, then surrounds, confirming each step. If a step fails or you cancel, it attempts to restore the previous layout. Keep the progress sheet open and send Submit diagnostics if it does not finish.
  • The fronts bond on an Arc Ultra but play nothing. That’s a known problem the developer is still chasing, and you aren’t doing anything wrong. It helps to try the layout the other way round (for example the Era 300s as fronts and the Fives as surrounds) and then send Submit diagnostics from the menu right after a try where the fronts stay silent.
  • Beam Ultra. The bar accepts added fronts but keeps its front and height channels, so those fronts stay silent. Setup warns you before you continue. Its Don’t show this again choice is remembered separately from the general fronts warning.
Bonding fronts also has trade-offs, including Trueplay turning off while they’re bonded — see Separate front speakers and Troubleshooting.
Somos finds speakers on the Wi-Fi your iPhone is on, so start with the checklist under Help & Support → Settings Somos needs: UPnP on in the Sonos® app, a VPN that allows your home network, the phone on the same Wi-Fi as the speakers (not cellular), and not a guest or IoT network. Check that Local Network is allowed (App → Somos settings → Open iOS Settings for Somos).Then open the menu’s Your Sonos page:
  • Rescan My Network looks again for the speakers on the network you’re on now, for example after you arrive at another house.
  • Two systems (S1 and S2), or two homes. Somos keeps each Sonos® system separate. If more than one is listed, tap the one you want. If one is missing, use Add a Home: name it, connect to that home’s Wi-Fi, then tap Scan for System. The name tells your homes apart in the switcher.
If the official Sonos® app finds a speaker and Somos doesn’t, send Submit diagnostics from the menu (Advanced Settings). See Troubleshooting and Multiple Systems.
Crossover appears in any room with a bonded Sub whose speaker reports a crossover, not only on a Sonos® Amp. It’s shown in hertz (50–110 Hz) with the other sound sliders. If it isn’t there, the room’s speaker didn’t report one. If you move it and it goes back, the speaker refused the value, and Somos shows what the speaker really has. Presets carry the crossover too. See EQ & Trueplay and the crossover entry in Troubleshooting.
You don’t need one. Install TestFlight from the App Store, then go back and open the beta link on the same iPhone or iPad: testflight.apple.com/join/2D778AXH. Tap Accept, then Install. Redeem in the TestFlight app only takes codes from email invitations, so nothing typed there will work. To let someone else try Somos, send them the same link. See First Launch.
On the Arc Ultra and Beam Ultra, Speech Boost is a level (Off, Low, Medium, High, Max), not an on/off switch; other soundbars show a switch. Somos reads the value back after every change. If the speaker doesn’t accept it, the control goes back and a message says the speaker refused it. A preset only changes Speech Boost if you ticked Speech Boost when you saved it. See Troubleshooting.
Yes. In a group, the teal Group slider moves every room together, and the blue slider above it is still that room’s own volume. Expand Room volumes to set each room in the group on its own. See Grouping Rooms.
Yes. A preset saves the Sub switch and the Surrounds switch along with bass, treble, height and the levels, so a “Neighbours” preset can turn the Sub off and another can turn it back on. Volume, Night Sound, Speech Boost and Loudness are only saved if you tick them on the Save Preset sheet. See Sound Presets.
The bar shows every room. If they don’t all fit, the row scrolls and keeps the room you’re on in view, and you can swipe the tabs to go to the next room. To change the order, press and hold a tab, tap Reorder, drag the tabs, then tap Done. The menu’s Rooms list also shows every room at once. You can also switch to the Room wheel in Somos settings. See Favorites.
Open the menu, tap Unlock Whole Home (or Manage Whole Home), then Restore Purchases, signed in to the same Apple Account you bought with. If a family organiser has to approve it, the page says the purchase is waiting for approval and Whole Home turns on once it goes through. If Apple keeps asking for your password, turn on Settings › Face ID & Passcode › iTunes & App Store to confirm with Face ID. See Whole Home.
Use a Rooms row and Widget’s room. Long-press the widget, tap Edit Widget, set one row’s Type to Rooms, and set the Room of the other rows to Widget’s room. Now tap a room in the Rooms row: it is the picked button, with a thin white border, and every row set to Widget’s room drives that room. Until you tap one, the widget uses the room you had open last in the app. Picking a room in the widget never changes the room the app has open. See Widget & Siri.
They are row types added in build 40.0.2. Rooms shows three room buttons, each saying what its room is doing (on TV, playing or idle); tap one to make it the widget’s room. Now Playing is one wide button for the row’s room with the album art or the TV symbol, the song, a volume ring and Play/Pause. Sound has Night Sound, Speech Boost and Go to TV / Go to Music for a home theater room. See Widget & Siri.
From build 40.0.2 the Rooms complication — the Room button, round or in a corner — is the word ROOM, as big as the slot allows. Tap it to see your rooms, groups and favorite groups and pick one. The wide card is Now Playing: the song, the source and the volume. (The wide Room card from earlier test builds was removed in 40.0.5; a face spot that held it is blank until you pick Now Playing.) See Watch Face.
The Crown turns the volume while the volume line has its green box. Scroll the room screen with a finger, or tap elsewhere on it, and the Crown scrolls the screen instead; tap the volume line to put the box back. See Apple Watch and Troubleshooting.
From build 40.0.2 the Live Activity is drawn in the same navy as the Home Screen widget; from build 40.0.5 that navy is a darker one on the widgets, the Lock Screen card and the Dynamic Island, with bigger symbols and labels that wrap, and the picked widget button has a thin white border. A TV room shows the format as DOLBY ATMOS and EARC badges, a music room shows its album art (also in the Dynamic Island), the loaded preset is lit in the picked glass, and Mute turns grey with a slashed speaker while the room is muted. See Live Activity.
Yes. Bookworm lives only in the menu, on its own line under Help & Support: Get help from Somos Bookworm. It opens a help assistant that answers your questions from this manual. Help & Support itself has Settings Somos needs, the manual and the website. See The Menu.
Open the menu and tap Get help from Somos Bookworm, on its own line under Help & Support. This is the only place you open Bookworm in the app. Ask it about Somos or your Sonos® setup and it answers from this manual.
From build 40.0.5 they are in the menu under Advanced Settings. See The Menu.
No. Somos InControl is an independent, unofficial third-party app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Sonos, Inc. It uses the publicly documented local control protocol to communicate with Sonos® speakers on your Wi-Fi network.
Yes, for one room, with no time limit and everything that room can do: presets, EQ, the Sub, surrounds and front speakers, music, the Lock Screen card, the Apple Watch and iCloud sync. The Home Screen widgets and Siri are free too. Whole Home is a one-time purchase that gives every other room the full Somos and adds grouping and saved groups, and it’s shared with your family. Somos is coming soon to the App Store, with Whole Home at a launch price. On TestFlight, Buy is a free test purchase. See Whole Home.
Yes, when you’re signed in to iCloud with the same Apple ID. Presets, home names, room order, saved groups, favorites, playlists and app switches sync between your iPhone and iPad, and come back after you delete and reinstall Somos. Give it a minute after opening the app. Room names stay on your speakers, as always. See iCloud Sync.
Yes. A few things are built for it:
  • Sliders step by one. Swipe up or down on Bass, Treble, Height or Speech Boost to move one step. Their − and + buttons are skipped while VoiceOver is on, since the slider already does the job. Volume keeps its buttons.
  • Room tabs are easy to hit. Each tab on the bottom bar is a full 44-point target. To reorder, use the Move left and Move right actions on a tab.
  • Album art. On the player, the first action on the art is Play / Pause, then next and previous song.
  • Room names read properly, including ones with an apostrophe or an ampersand, such as “Sam’s Arc” or “Kitchen & Dining”, on screen and in VoiceOver.
Somos InControl works with Sonos® speakers that support local control on the network — S2 systems and S1 systems alike. Every room appears in the app — home theater (soundbar) rooms, stereo pairs, single speakers, and portables such as Move and Roam. As a general rule: if your speaker shows up in the official Sonos® app on the same Wi-Fi, it should show up here too.All rooms get volume, bass, treble, loudness, presets, Trueplay, Status Light, Touch Controls and the music page. Home-theater-only controls — TV / Music source, the audio-format badge, TV presets, Night Sound, Speech Boost, height and surround levels — appear only in rooms with a soundbar (Arc, Arc Ultra, Beam, Beam Ultra, Ray, Playbar, Playbase). A single speaker, a stereo pair or an Amp is a music room, with or without a Sub: its presets, bass, treble and Loudness are on the music page, and its room page keeps volume, Balance and the Sub’s switch, crossover and phase. Subwoofer controls — level, on/off, Sub phase — appear in any room that has a Sub bonded; from build 35.7.4 the crossover slider appears wherever the room’s speaker reports a crossover, not only on a Sonos Amp.If a specific model isn’t being discovered, contact support with the model name.
No. Somos InControl does not use your Sonos® account and has no account of its own. It talks to your speakers directly over Wi-Fi — no cloud, no sign-in. Playback works without a login, because the speaker streams from the service itself and your phone only sends the command.Browsing a music service inside Somos is the one place you sign in — to that service, on its own page, so Somos can show you its catalogue and your library. Apple Music asks for an iPhone permission instead. See Music Services.
Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Bandcamp. Each one you have set up is a button at the top of the music page: tap it, browse or search, and play straight to the room. The service also has to be on your Sonos® system — if it isn’t, the app tells you to add it in the Sonos® app first. Want another service? Tell the developer through Help & Support → Visit our website in the menu. See Music Services.
Apple lets only the Sonos® app sign in to Apple Music, so Somos browses it from your iPhone instead — the catalogue, your library and the quality badges (Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless, Dolby Atmos) all come through Apple’s own framework, which needs that permission. Tap Allow when asked, or turn it on later under Settings → Somos InControl. The speaker plays on the Apple Music account your Sonos® system already has.
The Sonos® Favorites and Playlists tiles are no longer on the music page. Favorites in Somos are now your own: tap the heart on any song, album, playlist or station from a music service and it is kept on the Favorites page — the button above the music services, beside Playlists. The Apple Watch app still plays your Sonos® favorites. See Favorites & Queue.
Tap the plus on the song — on any song row or tile while browsing, or on a song on the Favorites page. A short message says Added to the queue and nothing else changes. For the song playing now, tap the plus next to the heart on the player: it opens Add to playlist, with Add to queue at the top and your playlists below.To play every hearted song in one go, open the Favorites page and tap Play all beside the heading — it fills the room’s queue with your songs in page order and starts the first one. Stations, albums and playlists are skipped, and the message says how many. See Favorites & Queue.
Yes. Open the menu, tap Your Sonos, then Set a sleep timer, and pick 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 min, or Off. It is your Sonos® speaker’s own timer, so it runs with Somos closed. The minutes left show on the room page, and the Sleep Timer complication puts them on your watch face. See Sleep Timer.Alarms too. Open Alarms from the menu to see each alarm with its room and days and turn it on or off, or add one: pick the room and time, the days it repeats, what it plays (the Sonos® chime or one of your favorites) and its own volume. Alarms are stored on your Sonos®, so they ring with Somos closed. See Alarms.
iOS requires any app that discovers and communicates with devices on your local Wi-Fi to request Local Network permission. Somos InControl needs it to find your Sonos® speakers. Without it, the app has nothing to control. The permission only lets the app see devices on the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to — nothing else.If you declined the prompt initially, re-enable it in Settings → Somos InControl → Local Network (Open Settings on the No speakers found screen, or the menu’s App → Somos settings → Open iOS Settings for Somos, takes you straight there).
No. Somos InControl only works on the same local Wi-Fi network as your Sonos® speakers. This is a deliberate design choice — it’s what keeps the app fast, private, and free of any account requirement. If you’re away from home and need remote control, use the official Sonos® app.
Dial in the sound you want, then hold a preset card. On the Save Preset sheet, name it and tick anything extra you want it to carry — Volume, Night Sound, Speech Boost, Loudness — then tap Save. Bass, treble and the surround, height, subwoofer and crossover levels are always saved. Tap a preset to load it. Hold it again and change only the name to Rename it without touching its values.Each room has three music presets on its music page, and a soundbar room has three TV presets on its room page as well. Saving a fresh slot always keeps the sound you set along with the name. The preset you loaded stays highlighted when you leave the room, switch rooms or reopen the app; changing any control it captured clears the highlight and a toast says the preset was disabled. A TV room’s three presets are also on the Lock Screen card, and the Apple Watch app shows the room’s three presets under its volume. See Sound Presets.
Yes, in two senses. The bottom bar holds your rooms as tabs (with your saved groups next to them as bookmark tabs), and you can swipe the tabs or the room pages to change room; the menu lists every room. And you can group rooms so they play the same audio: tap the group button at the top-right of a room (on a system with only one room there is nothing to group with, so the button isn’t shown), switch other rooms on, and every room in the group gets a Group slider that moves every speaker together — each room keeps its own slider too. Grouped rooms use the presets of the room that leads the group. Every room beyond your free one, and grouping, are part of Whole Home. See Grouping Rooms.
The Live Activity is off by default. Open the menu, tap App → Somos settings and switch Live Activity on. If it still doesn’t appear, iOS may have Live Activities disabled for the app — the menu shows an orange link that opens Settings → Apps → Somos InControl → Live Activities. The card ends about 30 minutes after you background the app; reopening the app brings it back.
Trueplay is Sonos®‘s room calibration feature. It tunes your speaker’s sound to match the acoustics of your room, and turning it on generally improves sound quality. The Trueplay tile in every room shows whether the room is tuned (then it’s an on/off switch), untuned (Tune in Sonos app — calibration itself only runs in the official app), or blocked, with a Why not? explanation.
Sonos® firmware can’t tune a room with separate front speakers bonded to the soundbar, so Trueplay becomes unavailable — the app warns you about this before it bonds fronts. The trade-off is yours: a larger soundstage with the custom configuration, or your original layout with Trueplay. Port, Connect and Roam SL never support Trueplay at all.
No — firmware updates are handled exclusively by the official Sonos® app. What Somos InControl does do: if a speaker is running older firmware than the rest of your system (Sonos® quarantines it), that room shows Needs a firmware update and its page has no controls until the Sonos® app has updated it. If all your speakers match, Somos stays quiet — it never nags you to update.
Yes. Somos InControl lets you bond separate front left and right speakers to a soundbar, something the official Sonos® app doesn’t offer. The soundbar becomes the centre channel and some of its own drivers go quiet, the fronts receive steered channels rather than their own Atmos feed, and Trueplay is unavailable while fronts are bonded. Fronts must be assigned as a matched pair. See Speaker Setup.
Yes. On a single speaker’s page, press and hold the room diagram to open the Stereo Pair sheet, pick a same-model partner, choose which is left, and apply. On an existing pair the same sheet has Separate stereo pair. See Speaker Setup.
Yes. They appear as normal rooms with their battery level next to the model name at the top of the page. If you switch a portable to Bluetooth it disappears from the app — and from the official Sonos® app — because on Bluetooth it only plays from the phone it’s paired with. Turn Bluetooth off on the speaker and it comes back on its own.
Not from inside the app — Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to initiate AirPlay to external speakers. However, AirPlay-capable Sonos® speakers accept AirPlay directly from the iOS AirPlay picker, where they appear alongside any other AirPlay speakers in your home.
All three. The Home Screen widget (small, medium, large) offers preset buttons, volume/mute rows, a button that sets a room to the volume you chose, and Rooms, Now Playing and Sound rows; a row set to Widget’s room follows the room you tap in the widget. Siri applies presets by name — “Apply Movies in Somos InControl” — and can turn the volume up or down, set an exact volume or switch room. The Watch app lists your rooms, plays, pauses and skips, turns the volume (a grouped room’s group volume) with the Crown, loads presets and plays a Sonos® favorite. Its complications put the Room button (it reads ROOM), your room and what is playing, its volume, its EQ, the sleep timer, favorites, presets and one-tap Mute, Night Sound, Speech Boost and TV / Music on the watch face, and the menu’s App → Apple Watch pop-up adds a ready-made Somos face. See Widget & Siri, Apple Watch and Watch Face.
No. Nothing goes to us — there are no servers, no analytics, no telemetry and no account. What leaves your device is the local control messages your speakers need, one image request to Sonos®‘s public photo library for speaker pictures, your requests to a music service’s own servers when you browse it, and, when you’re signed in to iCloud, your settings to your own iCloud storage so your other devices get them. The Whole Home purchase goes through Apple’s App Store. Links in the menu open a web page in your browser; the app itself sends nothing to it, and Submit diagnostics only opens an email, or the share sheet, for you to decide. See Data & Network and the Privacy Policy.