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

[svish]

Disappointing to hear about this.

 

[CrysisDeu]

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?

I sure hope engineering is as easy as reverting to a backup. But it’s not

 

[psxp]

what a joke and disaster - 😂

 

[whitby]

Must admit I do not care. I have a pair of ERA 100s and a pair for ERA 300s along with a couple of ROAMs and I usually stream via Airplay, so the SONOS app is used purely for configuration and either works just as well. It seems to be a big issue for some, and for them I have sympathy but there are other options for Apple Music subscribers.

 

[MuppetGate]

He was at BlackBerry helping oversee that collapse so he has some knowledge.

And suddenly, everything is painfully clear.

 

[CarpalMac]

Yet another example of how the IoT is just a horrible, horrible thing. As a consumer you have little to no control about what your hardware can do, how much it costs to do it and whether you wake up tomorrow to find it as useful as a brick.

I am sure there are hundreds of examples, but for me I personally have had:
- Logitech turning off mysqueezebox, leaving their squeezebox devices dumb
- Google decided that all my cameras now must have the green light on. A handy visual indicator to crims when the coast is clear
- ITTT gimped their service then started wanting to charge as much as Amazon did for Prime
- Near mandatory Nest subscription price rises for remote storage as I cannot use my own. I could of course use them *dumb*, but then what would be the point...
- Other things I have no doubt forgotten

I have a household full of Sonos kit built up over the years but immediately stopped buying after their bricking debacle. Back then you could see what utter asshats they are and it is clear to see that nothing has changed.

 

[canadianreader]

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.

No smart speakers for me either because of data collection and the proprietary software that comes with them any bad update could render them useless like Sonos

 

[Rewster]

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.

THIS!! I have been a lurker on this Forum for about ten years but just registered because I wanted to congratulate Sowelu on this post. My experience has been identical. So disappointing from a company that I once admired.

 

[MacsRgr8]

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.

Yeah, I agree. To me it’s also the notion that “smart” speakers are kinda fragile, and can loose connection.

I usually get a decent amplifier or AV receiver to hook directly to a sound source like Apple TV, BD Player, Mac etc via USB / HDMI and connect a decent pair (or 5.1 set) of speakers to the amplifier / AV receiver.

Just recently I purchased a pair of HomePod minis (in stereo setup) to connect wirelessly to AppleTV, and/or use from iPad / iPhone.
I won’t talk about the sound quality of the minis as that is not the reason why I purchased them (merely convenience), but the “wirelesslessness” of the HomePods is not convenient, as the USB-C cables are too short too short to have them plugged into a wall socket and have them decently set apart to actually experience “stereo”.
So, I had to get an USB-C extension cable.

Sure it works, but I do feel it’s “fragile”. Sometimes AppleTV suddenly responds with “cannot connect to Homepods..” and I have to restart them, etc.
Sometimes only the “right” HomePod responds.

I understand the wish to easily stream music from an iPhone / Mac to a ”wireless” speaker, but I prefer the “classic and dumb” AV setup: decent receiver and speakers, and let AppleTV do the streaming.

 

[canadianreader]

Yet another example of how the IoT is just a horrible, horrible thing. As a consumer you have little to no control about what your hardware can do, how much it costs to do it and whether you wake up tomorrow to find it as useful as a brick.

I am sure there are hundreds of examples, but for me I personally have had:
- Logitech turning off mysqueezebox, leaving their squeezebox devices dumb
- Google decided that all my cameras now must have the green light on. A handy visual indicator to crims when the coast is clear
- ITTT gimped their service then started wanting to charge as much as Amazon did for Prime
- Near mandatory Nest subscription price rises for remote storage as I cannot use my own. I could of course use them *dumb*, but then what would be the point...
- Other things I have no doubt forgotten

I have a household full of Sonos kit built up over the years but immediately stopped buying after their bricking debacle. Back then you could see what utter asshats they are and it is clear to see that nothing has changed.

The best way is to selfhost these IoT devices you get full control plus privacy and peace of mind.

 

[Hamsterhjulet]

I’m so disappointed in Sonos and all this new app catastrophe. I rarely had problems with my setup before the new app. Now I’m having trouble finding my speakers on Airplay often (couple times a day).

 

[Artemis70]

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.

I guess the story is something like this:
One of the bean counters said: let's just re-release the old app. All the bean counters rejoiced at the brilliant thought. Only after communicating their brilliant thought to the world, they decided to tell engineering.

Alternatively, they did ask engineering if it was possible, and got a no, but decided to not trust engineering thinking that engineering must be able to find a way. It should be as simple as restoring a backup, right?

 

[dumastudetto]

This is why I use HomePod. They just work and sound amazing.

 

[macduke]

This sounds like it’s only about money because you could definitely pay to fire up some new cloud servers and just pull your old release branch for the back end using your version control software like git and then take the old release branch from the app and update any IP addresses it used to connect to the API for these new servers and release it as a new app on the store. Then you could have both releases public and continue to work on the new one. Then you’d have to pay devs to maintain two code bases and pay server admins to maintain two backends. Money, money, money. All very possible to do. The big question is how to update the actual sound hardware to be able to use both. I would update it to connect to an intermediary and from there you can set which server it uses for connectivity and instructions via your Sonos account login or something. Idk how it works because I don’t have one.

 

[Godspeed8230]

This is why I use HomePod. They just work and sound amazing.

You can't compare HomePods to Sonos, though. Different use case altogether.

I am lucky, I have multiple speakers and so far I have only had minor glitches and problems. They do sound amazing and they create a unique soundscape in our home. I hope they bring the app up to par with their hardware.
It's really unfortunate they "had" to relase a new app because of their new headphones.

 

[dstyp]

"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)."

"...said on Reddit (via The Verge)" ????

Then link reddit directly, come on journalists!

reddit link

 

[Godspeed8230]

And suddenly, everything is painfully clear.

Patrick Spence worked for Blackberry until 2012. When he left Blackberry, it was at its absolute peak in revenue and install base. He also worked in the sales and marketing function, not the engineering or design function, and so not responsible for its product decisions that led to the companies death (years after his departure).

And then, in the 10 years since he joined Sonos, the company was on a continuous revenue growth (up until 2023FY)

In his tenure as CEO starting in 2017, to the plateau in 2023, sales just about doubled.

 

[sunapple]

This is why I use HomePod. They just work and sound amazing.

Though similar to Sonos you could still wonder what will break sooner, the hardware or the software support…

 

[matsan]

as long as they don’t close down the “api” to home assistance we are happy. Running most operations through HA. Only pain is the lack of multi install support old app handled so smooth.

 

[ric22]

Yet another example of how the IoT is just a horrible, horrible thing. As a consumer you have little to no control about what your hardware can do, how much it costs to do it and whether you wake up tomorrow to find it as useful as a brick.

I am sure there are hundreds of examples, but for me I personally have had:
- Logitech turning off mysqueezebox, leaving their squeezebox devices dumb
- Google decided that all my cameras now must have the green light on. A handy visual indicator to crims when the coast is clear
- ITTT gimped their service then started wanting to charge as much as Amazon did for Prime
- Near mandatory Nest subscription price rises for remote storage as I cannot use my own. I could of course use them *dumb*, but then what would be the point...
- Other things I have no doubt forgotten

I have a household full of Sonos kit built up over the years but immediately stopped buying after their bricking debacle. Back then you could see what utter asshats they are and it is clear to see that nothing has changed.

I've had endless problems with my HomePods, enough to discourage me from buying more wireless speakers for at least the next decade. Meanwhile I can still hook my laptop to the speakers I was gifted in the 1980s and everything works effortlessly.

 

[MaximizedAction]

Watching history itself does put a smile on my face.

Regards,
Sonos S1 app user

 

[sambwker]

Shareholders kill companies, especially venture capital. Purchase company, put a penny pinching CEO in control, squeeze all the value possible out of it and cheapen the product, then resell to the next venture fund and move on to the next. Countless companies are victims and the customer is the sponsor.

 

[emulator]

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.

So true, Klipsch, wires and a nice receiver... yeah, my speakers can't tell me where's my order but still sound 17x better than any Sonos.

 

[Col4bin]

Apple acquired Beats primarily for Beats Music which became Apple Music. The headphones were secondary.

Really? iTunes existed way before Beats Music.

 

[H_D]

Welcome to the age of the perpetual Beta, in soft- as in hardware. It's not as if some Apple OS-releases or Adobe Updates weren't faulty as well, and majorly messed up peoples lives. It would be a shame if the only company so far that really managed to deliver affordable, well-rounded wireless speakers should stumble over an App update and the financial pressures of having gone public. We use two Fives and the Sub (plus a Move for the outside) and it fills a rather large office space beautifully with clean bass even at low volumes and a brutal sound when you crank it up. I've more or less tried ten different brands, no one sounds as good and installs as simple as Sonos does. I hope they get out of this and prosper again. If you ask me, their App doesn't have to be a one-in-all with different streaming options etc etc. Just give me something to update the hardware, control the EQ/Sound, maybe stop music streaming from one of the other iPhone or Macs in the office when someone in the team is streaming to the speakers and that's it. Keep it simple and functional and open.