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Sonos Can't Release Old App for Customers Unhappy With Design Changes

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Sonos won't be able to re-release its old app to appease customers that have been dissatisfied with the new version of the app, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence today said on Reddit (via The Verge).

sonos-redesigned-app.jpg

Spence said that he was "hopeful" the old app would be able to be re-released up until "very recently" as an alternative for people having issues, but Sonos found that doing so would ultimately make the issues worse because of backend updates to cloud servers and the software that runs on speakers.
Everything has been on the table in terms of finding the fastest path to fixing your systems. In fact, until very recently I'd been hopeful that we could re-release the old app (S2) as an alternative for those of you that are having issues that we've not yet resolved.

The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In the months since the new mobile app launched we've been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what you remember. After doing extensive testing we've reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better. I'm sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing to me.
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Earlier this month, The Verge reported that Sonos was considering bringing back the original version of its app, and Sonos was reportedly hopeful that allowing customers to revert to the old app would provide an interim solution as the company works to improve the new app. It sounds like that plan has been scrapped, which is unfortunate for customers who are having problems with the redesign.

Sonos released a redesigned version of its app back in May, and it has turned out to be a disaster for the company. Sonos customers quickly found that the new app lacked several key features and was riddled with bugs, and there have been ongoing complaints for months.

Sonos issued an apology in July and shared an outline of future update plans that will see missing features returned in September and October. In August, Sonos said that it would delay two upcoming product launches planned for 2024 to focus on improving the app.

In today's Reddit post, Spence said that the "original architect of the Sonos platform" has been put back in charge, and that the company has also "pulled together the very best and most experienced engineers" that it has to work on the app until it is fixed.

Article Link: Sonos Can't Release Old App for Customers Unhappy With Design Changes
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/20/sonos-not-rereleasing-old-app/
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May want to adjust the title. The main reason people don't like it is because the new app has made people's systems unusable.

For example, multiple speakers that used to work for me just don't anymore. I haven't changed any settings within Sonos or on my wifi network.

I appreciate Macrumors and all of the other tech outlets reporting on this to keep the fire lit so they fix our systems so we can use them again.
 
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So glad I never jumped on this brand, it seems to be a dumpster fire lately.

Edit: This is also why I won't buy into any "smart" speakers, from any manufacturer. The software can get pulled from you at any time and the "smarts" of the speaker will be useless long before the speaker itself dies.
 
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QandnotU said:
Any development team worth their salt, especially on a ground up redesign, should ensure there was a way to revert back to the old apps/architecture in the event a release is Munsoned.
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It probably has something to do with heavily migrated databases / database table changes to support performance goals. And in my own experience software teams everywhere do their work day by day.. long term architecture is just a silly hat that CTOs and principle architects pretend to wear as if they can somehow get through all the friction.. And then their outstanding action taken when they conclude it's too hard is to make the product "legacy" and do a rewrite.. aka top brass leaders in tech are really just mediocre.. no offense.
 
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Well done.... thank goodness I never bought anything from them... They want to imitate Apple by not letting anyone change their devices... now how to solve it? If they hadn't been so greedy... Any serious company would be able to revert a FW, that's the basics of the basics in any system... now f,,, them...
 
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Why on EARTH would you publicly say you’re considering doing something that gets a lot of peoples hopes up, then yank the rug out and say “sorry…j/k!”

This situation is gonna become a case study for leadership incompetence in every business school’s freshman coursework here forward.
 
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c84216 said:
Why on EARTH would you publicly say you’re considering doing something that gets a lot of peoples hopes up, then yank the rug out and say “sorry…j/k!”

This situation is gonna become a case study for leadership incompetence in every business school’s freshman coursework here forward.
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They should give everyone a coupon and accept bricked Sonos units to ethically recycle them.. Now there is a bunch of ewaste being created.
 
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Nermal said:
Who apparently can't restore a backup. Or have they thrown away the source code for the previous versions of the firmware and cloud services?
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Exactly my thoughts. Someone has failed at revision control.

To be fair, they probably did not anticipate wanting to roll back to the previous state.

I do like the sound of the "original architect" being "put back in charge."

Maybe other companies will learn from this.
 
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