These unofficial Sony apps let you ditch your phone to control your headphones

Being able to control devices through apps on our phones is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure, apps can open up tons of new features, and being able to configure devices remotely lets manufactures simplify hardware designs. But the flip side there is that making even basic changes means that we need our phone — and that’s not always handy. If you’ve ever wished that you could didn’t have to keep turning to Sony’s smartphone app to tweak your headphones, we’ve got some good news to share.

Sony earbuds and headphones rely on the company’s Sound Connect app to adjust all manner of settings, from noise cancelation to equalizer options. But what do you do if you’re gaming at your PC and want to change some of those, but your phone’s off in another room? With the unofficial Sony Device Center open source project, you’re now free to adjust all those options to your heart’s content, right from your computer.

The software’s under development for both Windows and Linux environments, and is compatible with popular models like this year’s XM6 earbuds. It offers support for all of Sony’s different noise modes, opens up full equalizer settings, lets you adjust feature timeouts, and even lets you control Sony’s AI-powered DSEE Extreme upscaling. It’s all built of top of efforts to reverse-engineer Sony’s proprietary protocols, and can even automatically detect the right version to use to talk to different hardware generations.

While this one just caught our eye on the Sony headphones Reddit sub, it’s worth noting that this app is a fork of the existing SonyBridge project, also available on GitHub with the same MIT license. With much of the same underlying functionality, we’ll leave it up to you to choose which you prefer — that one even adds Mac support!

Obviously, when we’re dealing with unofficial software, users will be accepting a certain degree of risk — so we understand that solutions like this aren’t going to be for everyone. And based on some of the responses we’ve seen on Reddit, there are definitely a few bugs that are currently hampering the experience.

That said, with enough interest hopefully we’ll see those issues addressed in good time, giving users more control over the hardware they own without being forced to only use Sony-approved tools. If you’ve tried either of these programs, let us know how well they worked for you down in the comments.