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Sonos Can't Release Old App for Customers Unhappy With Design Changes
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I’ve been an early adopter since the mid-90s. I’ve worked in the home electronics and automation industry for over 25 years with Sonos being one of our partner brands. Examples like this are why I’ve personally resorted to FM radio, iPods, CDs, my own music server, and records.
For the most part, music has existed without the need to be ‘connected’. I appreciate technology, its conveniences, and the jockeying of enticing user experiences but I prefer things to reliably work as they have for as long as I’ve been using them. I have made conscience decisions to minimize my reliance on apps and software and developers who (too often) intentionally upend perfectly great user experiences for the sake of I don’t know what.
I finally got fed up and unplugged my HomePod Minis. Maybe Apple Intelligence will fix them.
A similar story to what's happening with Sonos right now could pretty much be told about Apple. Except that their app was never very good. The expectations are so much lower. It's still a hobby for Apple.
And considering Sonos and Amazon are the "leaders" in this "space," it's not looking good for anyone else either.
I've been a software developer for almost 20 years now and one of the worst things you can do to something that is used by so many people is release a new version from scratch.
You will always have niche use cases you didn't think people were using, you will always have missing features, it will always need shoring up here and there, unless you spend ridiculous amounts of time and money of course, like way more than is reasonable to achieve the rewritten version being near to perfect.
Instead you should build upon the base you have. Code refactoring, tackling one feature at a time, improving the interface over time. You nudge it in the right direction.
I've been working on the same code base since 2016 for a popular product and every month we try to get out a substantial feature update either something new or something majorly improved. We would never do a full rewrite.. it would take years and 100% would not live up to what it's replacing, the scope of such an endeaver is too large and we can't discount the previoys years of effort that slowly shored things up.
It's wild to me that Sonos didn't understand this? it's like software 101 now days, you never do a full rewrite, always improve the code you have instead, wild stuff.
You will always have niche use cases you didn't think people were using, you will always have missing features, it will always need shoring up here and there, unless you spend ridiculous amounts of time and money of course, like way more than is reasonable to achieve the rewritten version being near to perfect.
Instead you should build upon the base you have. Code refactoring, tackling one feature at a time, improving the interface over time. You nudge it in the right direction.
I've been working on the same code base since 2016 for a popular product and every month we try to get out a substantial feature update either something new or something majorly improved. We would never do a full rewrite.. it would take years and 100% would not live up to what it's replacing, the scope of such an endeaver is too large and we can't discount the previoys years of effort that slowly shored things up.
It's wild to me that Sonos didn't understand this? it's like software 101 now days, you never do a full rewrite, always improve the code you have instead, wild stuff.
Now that is a funny thing to say on an Apple forward website.
I’ve tried Google, Amazon and Apple smart speakers and none have been rock solid reliable. I almost took the plunge and went with Sonus a while back thinking they must be the only company capable. So glad I didn’t.
I have older Sonos speakers that do not have AirPlay. I also have newer ones for which AirPlay works poorly: it take multiple tries for it to work; sometimes the phone says it's playing, but no sound comes out.
For these reasons I generally preferred the Sonos app because its audio was flawless...until now.
Due to the many flaws in Sonos I have recently started supplementing it with a JBL Bluetooth speaker, which has many advantages.
Sonos will not get any more of my money.
No, this actually makes sense, the backend APIs now likely lead the old app and a lot of the endpoints and features the old app depended on are likely either removed, deprecated, or unmaintained, they cant just restore a backup, they’d probably have to revert everything from build and deployment tooling to test harnesses to possibly even firmware across customer platforms.
It’s likely move forward is the best approach
What I want to know is why the og architect was removed from the position and someone apparently incompetent put in charge to begin with, because this smells to me of a product manager trying to make a name for themselves and playing politics to remove obstacles (like a system architect who would have resisted a half-assed redesign).
I’ve been a Sonos customer for many years and here’s the funny thing: the speakers weren’t initially reliable. Then they improved the reliability through software updates. Now they seem to only break things with updates. Lesson learned: never use auto update. Update your software when things aren’t working. And companies: stop trying to fix what isn’t broken.
The truth of the matter is they don’t want to roll it back. They saw that sweet sweet subscription revenue and took a swung and a miss.
There is literally zero reason core audio functionality requires a cloud backend.
Unless that “core” technology has a subscription service slapped onto it.
There is literally zero reason core audio functionality requires a cloud backend.
Unless that “core” technology has a subscription service slapped onto it.
Nope.
You revert EVERYTHING to the working version. And you do it by releasing a "new" build with a new version number that is just a reversion to the firmware that worked and a reversion to the app that worked. You restore your databases from backups. And you apologize A LOT.
Moving forward is the worst approach.
Nope.
These are speakers. Somebody should offer a service to strip out the 'smart' garbage and put banana jacks on them so you can hook them up to a proper amplifier with proper speaker cables.
They'll go from e-waste to speakers that will last for decades.
He was at BlackBerry helping oversee that collapse so he has some knowledge.
To be fair, Whackberry was going to collapse no matter what. Didn't matter who came out with a full screen phone that wasn't tied to a carrier, somebody was going to do it, and when it happened that junk was going to flop and flop hard.
The reality today, around 5 years from all manufactures on full support. S1 Sonos needed to go away long ago. Wait until Matter arrives. Do I like it, not really. Reality of our new hyper speed world. Fight it or as noted suffer the reality.
So how long before class action lawsuit is filed. Unless they put arbitration clause (which I think judge might be able to toss out and let the lawsuit go forward), Sonos might be in major trouble.
This is probably a huge win for Apple, since HomePod and HomePod mini are great Sonos alternative, if not better.
How many times do we need to see stuff like this before big tech companies learn to leave stuff alone that's working well?
Oh wait, if they don't update something every year then they won't be able to push people into unnecessary upgrades which translates to profit.
I've reached a point where I simply don't trust any new "gadget" because you never know when even a large firm will just pull the plug or force you to upgrade to a new version that works half as well as the older version...
Oh wait, if they don't update something every year then they won't be able to push people into unnecessary upgrades which translates to profit.
I've reached a point where I simply don't trust any new "gadget" because you never know when even a large firm will just pull the plug or force you to upgrade to a new version that works half as well as the older version...
I got into Sonos in 2016 because their speakers were well made, sounded amazing, and they had the best mobile and desktop (Mac) apps out there. They were clean, attractive, had intuitive interfaces and they 'just worked'. What sealed the deal for me, over and beyond the solid Sonos 'mesh' network which would bypass the need for the unreliable Apple AirPlay, was the fact that I could connect to any Sonos system and play music directly from my iTunes playlists directly from either my iPhone, iPad or Macs.
A few years later, after I added many more speakers to my system, Sonos decided to screw all their customers who don't stream and kill the ability to play music directly from an iOS device or Mac. You had to use a streaming service. I was in disbelief as this was one of the reasons why I chose the more expensive Sonos option over the competition at the time.
If that wasn't enough, Sonos completely revamped their beautiful, stable, easy to use desktop and mobile apps and turned them into clunky, unintuitive, unattractive apps with quality control issues. They, like many others at the time, followed Apple's awful GUI aesthetic (hide everything, remove all elegant features and overlays, require more taps, menus and clicks with endless wasted space).
With these dramatic changes and after spending a fortune on Sonos hardware, I sent a scathing email to the then CEO and he and one of this PR people actually responded, and after a lot of back and forth, this communication turned into an actual conference phone call. They were a smaller company in those days and I mentioned in my email that I purchased a total of 21 Sonos speakers, sound-bars and subs and installed them throughout my home, so perhaps that's why they responded.
The call wasn't very productive as they blamed Apple for why users could no longer play locally stored music (which was another way of saying that they were not going to invest time and money to keep up with the way Apple stores music locally), then told me to use a PC or Android (!) instead. Or, 'continue using your Apple devices, but use AirPlay instead of the Sonos mesh network'.
I lost it. I reminded them that I went with Sonos over the competition to AVOID using AirPlay and because I do not stream and wanted to play my locally saved music and playlists right from my iOS and Mac devices directly to my expensive Sonos system. I reminded them that they rendered my entire system, setup and investment useless, and that their 'software updates' effectively changed the products that I purchased just a few years ago. After your typical PR apologies and double-speak, their last bit of advice was for me to buy and setup a music server as a workaround.
Ever since this massive software overhaul and the removal of features, Sonos software has been their Achilles' heel and their inner-saboteur ever since. I am convinced that they started to outsource their software to a subpar company and have never looked back while gaslighting customers into thinking that 'it's better than ever before'. With each update the apps would get more and more clunky, ugly, unintuitive and buggy AF, so this latest debacle does not surprise me in the least.
Sonos makes excellent hardware that sounds amazing and built like tanks, but their software has sucked for many years, and I am glad that it's now finally getting the massive attention that it deserves. They need to go back to the drawing board and start over from the ground up because if they think the app was good prior to this latest hot mess of an update (if they can even find a way to revert back to it), they are sorely mistaken.
A few years later, after I added many more speakers to my system, Sonos decided to screw all their customers who don't stream and kill the ability to play music directly from an iOS device or Mac. You had to use a streaming service. I was in disbelief as this was one of the reasons why I chose the more expensive Sonos option over the competition at the time.
If that wasn't enough, Sonos completely revamped their beautiful, stable, easy to use desktop and mobile apps and turned them into clunky, unintuitive, unattractive apps with quality control issues. They, like many others at the time, followed Apple's awful GUI aesthetic (hide everything, remove all elegant features and overlays, require more taps, menus and clicks with endless wasted space).
With these dramatic changes and after spending a fortune on Sonos hardware, I sent a scathing email to the then CEO and he and one of this PR people actually responded, and after a lot of back and forth, this communication turned into an actual conference phone call. They were a smaller company in those days and I mentioned in my email that I purchased a total of 21 Sonos speakers, sound-bars and subs and installed them throughout my home, so perhaps that's why they responded.
The call wasn't very productive as they blamed Apple for why users could no longer play locally stored music (which was another way of saying that they were not going to invest time and money to keep up with the way Apple stores music locally), then told me to use a PC or Android (!) instead. Or, 'continue using your Apple devices, but use AirPlay instead of the Sonos mesh network'.
I lost it. I reminded them that I went with Sonos over the competition to AVOID using AirPlay and because I do not stream and wanted to play my locally saved music and playlists right from my iOS and Mac devices directly to my expensive Sonos system. I reminded them that they rendered my entire system, setup and investment useless, and that their 'software updates' effectively changed the products that I purchased just a few years ago. After your typical PR apologies and double-speak, their last bit of advice was for me to buy and setup a music server as a workaround.
Ever since this massive software overhaul and the removal of features, Sonos software has been their Achilles' heel and their inner-saboteur ever since. I am convinced that they started to outsource their software to a subpar company and have never looked back while gaslighting customers into thinking that 'it's better than ever before'. With each update the apps would get more and more clunky, ugly, unintuitive and buggy AF, so this latest debacle does not surprise me in the least.
Sonos makes excellent hardware that sounds amazing and built like tanks, but their software has sucked for many years, and I am glad that it's now finally getting the massive attention that it deserves. They need to go back to the drawing board and start over from the ground up because if they think the app was good prior to this latest hot mess of an update (if they can even find a way to revert back to it), they are sorely mistaken.
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If it’s just an app sure, but sounds like they made extensive backend changes too
It’s a total f-up through and through
So I never had the old app, and I bought the home theatre set earlier this year — Arc, Sub Mini, and ikea Symonfisk bookshelf speakers. It’s been a couple months, and I never had a problem with the new app? Is it because I only use it as TV speakers — plug and play? I imagine that if you’re using it as a smart home, it can get confusing and bugged. I use HomeKit with my Mini HomePods/ATV to control my home and play music throughout the house.
I guess I never needed a more complicated function from these speakers — the audio quality is just superb, and a big upgrade from using my OG HomePod as a TV speaker (still going 5 years).
I guess I never needed a more complicated function from these speakers — the audio quality is just superb, and a big upgrade from using my OG HomePod as a TV speaker (still going 5 years).
just like Meta, a multi billions dollar company, cant even write a decent app