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

[JippaLippa]

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.

A good dac and a couple wired active speakers, all the way.

 

[bodhisattva]

“Sonos can’t release apps”.

There, I fixed it.

Except in the UK... where they can side load an even worse broken app and bypass all security as well. (Too soon?)

 

[ric22]

Unfortunately, many manufacturers today have adopted a 'take it or leave it' attitude, offering limited choices and often forcing consumers into subscription-based models. This shift away from consumer satisfaction is becoming increasingly prevalent.

The only fun subscriptions are gym and sports and streaming services... everything else is just an annoyance 😅

 

[rookie_macuser!]

Sonos user here, my take is that the first version of the new app was horrible!
But they have actually fixed everything I was missing (alarms are back, it remembers the services, etc.)

Some might see other issues, but for me it is all good and working well.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[Razorpit]

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?

It isn’t that simple. You have things like newer products that never had the older firmware, etc.

Something has happened to this company since they went public! These are some real growing pains. Even their messaging about this old app is a mess.

Yes, they went public. That tends to be the end of the fun era of things.

You are all overlooking the real fun of when a company goes public. Appeasing the bean counters, not the customers. 😉

 

[ric22]

Good technical article on what has gone wrong over at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-technical-analysis-andy-pennell-wigwc

Wow, that sounds like a clusterf*ck.

 

[klrobinson999]

This pretty inexcusable. It tells me that proper testing didn't occur before release. I love my Sonos products, but enough.

 

[AlfaMan65]

I don't think I've ever used a wireless system product that ever worked 100% all of the time. The original AppleTVs were a nightmare, you'd sit down as a family to watch a film and for some reason it would decide that it couldn't find my iMac or the WiFi, no reason. Then follows much turning on and off, rebooting and swearing, by which time everyone has gone off to do something else!

I have two of the Sonos/IKEA bookshelf speakers and a Roam, all brilliant hardware/sound, but as most have found the app is rubbish, old and new. I only ever used it to set up the speakers in the first place. I use Plex to connect to them to play my music library in conjunction with a WiiM Pro and Mini connected to wired speakers, works a treat.

It is a shame though as I would be very reluctant to buy any more Sonos products until this is all sorted out just in case it gets worse!

 

[gk_brown]

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?

As a developer who works on both the iOS side and the server side, I can assure you it's not that easy...

 

[Valve1138]

Just bought another Sonos home theater setup.

This whole thing is way overblown, as things often get on the internet.

 

[toobravetosave]

hope society finally purges MBAs

 

[seek3r]

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.

I have a suspicion a big part of the problem is also likely institutional knowledge loss too though, if I were a betting man I’d bet they lost a whole bunch of engineers when some product manager playing politics decided to make a new half-assed app and architecture and the original system architect was removed from his position. They may not have the engineers who fully understand how everything fit together anymore, and docs, even good docs, never capture everything.

It also sounds like they may use some of the backend code in both people’s devices and in their SaaS component, which would mean reverting firmware, which may be difficult in particular for devices that shipped after the change and were never tested with the older frameworks

 

[gdeusthewhizkid]

whatever this issue is I have a Sonos beam and Sonos sub mini and I was watching Hard Knocks on it last night no issues at all with it..

 

[LogicalApex]

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.

This is the result I expected when this was announced. They would have to revert firmware on speakers and I wasn’t sure how cleanly that could be done. Pretty clear it isn’t doable now.

The part that’s concerning though is that the CEO is only just now learning this.

I would have expected that the CEO would know what the options are ahead of green lighting the switch. As this is a risk factor you usually want to account for.

But maybe I am just too far down the totem pole as a practicing software engineer that I am thinking about these things and management isn’t.

 

[Plutonius]

This is the first tech thread I have seen in awhile that doesn't complain about Apple .

I think that Sonos should put most of their effort into correctly re-writing the app.

 

[deckard666]

I hate the Samsung app I have to contend with for my 1k soundbar - it is the only Samsung thing I’ve ever had to use and it’s just terrible… like a 5 yr old designed it - I wouldn’t buy another soundbar from them because of it

 

[Godspeed8230]

This pretty inexcusable. It tells me that proper testing didn't occur before release. I love my Sonos products, but enough.

For what it's worth Spence calls some bugs "esoteric" and difficult to reproduce.

 

[seek3r]

This is the result I expected when this was announced. They would have to revert firmware on speakers and I wasn’t sure how cleanly that could be done. Pretty clear it isn’t doable now.

The part that’s concerning though is that the CEO is only just now learning this.

I would have expected that the CEO would know what the options are ahead of green lighting the switch. As this is a risk factor you usually want to account for.

But maybe I am just too far down the totem pole as a practicing software engineer that I am thinking about these things and management isn’t.

It's corp culture, not just where you are on the totem pole. At my current job I'm a practicing engineer, not a manager, too, but I'm only 2 reporting levels down from the CEO because of my position and am in a lot of the high level meetings, I've *never* seen a major release happen without the question "where's the rollback plan" being asked and answered, and I've seen features blocked from release when the rollback plan wasnt deemed sufficient. The once in a while we've had to make truly breaking changes that cant really be rolled back without substantial pain we do *extensive* testing, and management is involved the whole way so they know the risks inside and out.

However I've been at other jobs in the same general position where the rollout has been "just get it out so we can talk features and we'll fix bugs later rolling forward".

The "move fast and break things" philosophy has been a disaster for tons products that need to stay stable, it's fine for a startup, and for initial R&D iterations on new things in larger companies, it needs to die for everything else.

There's a few reasons I've been at my current job for a long time now, and a couple of them are management actually listening to engineers and planning ahead (also helps that most of our management structure were engineers who were promoted rather than MBAs who never worked as engineers)

 

[npmacuser5]

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

Apple clearly defined they are all in on music. Will let others handle the home theater and legacy hardware. The core Sonos problem today, not focusing. Smart move Apple!

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Guess what makes me not ever want to buy speakers that need an app & internet connection.

 

[hagjohn]

Sounds like BS to me. They should be able to set up new instances/databases using old backups, etc.

Tech companies need to do a better job in mentoring people who have tech experience to become tech CEO's.

 

[npmacuser5]

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.

When a manufacturer messes with me like they have with you, I move on. I have Sonos speakers, Decided to use AirPlay2 and when new purchases needed, will look elsewhere. A note, the AirPlay today much different in a good way. Vote with ones pocketbook.

 

[goodthymes]

I'm in the market for a soundbar and was considering a Sonos, but I guess I'll keep on looking, ugh.

 

[stevet]

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?

This may not be doable considering the cloud/backend upgrades without potentially causing a worse situation with accounts.

 

[stevet]

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.

Like I responded earlier, this isn’t about reverting the app, it’s about reverting databases, account info, and some other backend changes. Reverting that may end up causing more issues, I don’t know to be fair.