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Sonos Considering Bringing Back Its Old Mobile App Amid Ongoing Issues
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I don’t think either of the apps have ever been fantastic. I never use it as I just mine as a 5.1 system on the tv.
I did notice you can’t play your own music via the app on your phone and that it only works with streaming services which is a massive disappointment
I did notice you can’t play your own music via the app on your phone and that it only works with streaming services which is a massive disappointment
Haha, yep. It's amazing how they insist on repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot- endlessly alienating their customers☹.
People and companies learn at different rates, just like every one of us. What we're witnessing in real time is Sonos learning this particular lesson the hard way.
Not sure how old you are, but this post has some serious old man vibes
That maybe the issue. But if that is then wow... What a way to go down!
I'm always in favour of feature flags and never breaking api contracts with server side but rather extending contracts. So you have a route back if it goes wrong. Especially with mission critical stuff. All this "all or nothing" approach to upgrading services is always crazy imho.
This is going to go down in tech lore as a thing not to do. Very Windows Vista like really. Even when the app is perfect people will still say its trash!
I can’t help but feel there is a bit of mob mentality with everyone hating on the new app. As a user of their speakers the app has always sucked in my opinion. I’ve used the new one a fair bit and it seems to function fine. I get all the grief with loosing access to local libraries but I can’t imagine that many people used that feature to get this much backlash.
You can still set up Windows without an MS account. I set up one as a casual gaming machine with a local account just the other week, no hackery required either. IIRC it was pretty much just a 'Skip this step' option like it is on OSX.
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I'm a bit on the fence on this one, not only for Sonos, but for apps in general. One side of the argument is that any app I open on my iPhone has a consistent UX so it's instantly intuitive to an iPhone user. However, the other side of the argument comes in when considering cross-platform apps, such as Facebook, where there's an expectation that I should have the same user experience whether I'm using Facebook on my Mac, PC, iPhone or Android device etc.
The new app is a piece of ****
I work writing SDKs for hardware devices in the security industry and if we had released something like this it would have killed the business.
Put the old app back it worked!
I work writing SDKs for hardware devices in the security industry and if we had released something like this it would have killed the business.
Put the old app back it worked!
Sonos followed the TiVo playbook.
TiVo could have been a leader in streaming devices if not for their "new and improved" software and refusal to transition away from cable. I haven't had cable in years, and they still send emails essentially begging for customers.
TiVo could have been a leader in streaming devices if not for their "new and improved" software and refusal to transition away from cable. I haven't had cable in years, and they still send emails essentially begging for customers.
Agree. TiVo still had the best interface but so behind in so many ways and therefore a dinosaur. They could have been the YouTube TV years ago and much better.
Or...run old API service and new service in parallel.
Sonos recently reintroduced the feature to roll back to S1 which I used on my 7 Sonos speakers. Now I can enjoy features like controlling volume on each speaker instantly, I can reorder tracks in the queue, I can group speakers and they start playing the same music, my stereo paired speakers now play music from both speakers and not just the left one, music from youtube music no longer plays and pauses, start from the beginning, alarms goes on exactly when they are set and not any other time of day etc.
This app has been a total train wreck for Sonos and it shows since sales has almost stopped. I can't imagine any serious seller who recommends Sonos to anyone at the moment.
Sonos have now used up large amounts of their customers and partners trust and should reintroduce the old app ASAP to try to limit the damage. For every day that goes on yet even more customers leave the platform and stops buying new stuff.
This app has been a total train wreck for Sonos and it shows since sales has almost stopped. I can't imagine any serious seller who recommends Sonos to anyone at the moment.
Sonos have now used up large amounts of their customers and partners trust and should reintroduce the old app ASAP to try to limit the damage. For every day that goes on yet even more customers leave the platform and stops buying new stuff.
I haven’t seen a lot of people here being positive about the app. I use it a lot, more than daily, and even if the start of the app was buggy, after about three weeks, it started to work flawless… It takes a little getting used to coming from the original app, but for us (my wife and me) there are no issues at all…
I also think this is a lesson for CEO's who believe dev teams when they say, "oh its easy to build this, we can do it in 6 months etc".. The older a legacy system is the more likely any new development team will not reverse engineer it enough to realise exactly how it works. Neither will QA have enough test cases to cover unknowns. Therefore they will miss key things and will be fixing forward for a very long time after initial release. This happens ALOT.
I think I'll call it the "Dev Hubris Factor". The ability of software devs when looking for new work to say how easy something will be and how poor the old implementation was and they will do it 10 times better, 10 times faster.
Its almost always bs.
Actual decent product available = (Initial release date + (No. of Years legacy system x 2 months) * Dev Hubris Factor)
Dev Hubris Factor = 1.5
I'm only half joking...
I think I'll call it the "Dev Hubris Factor". The ability of software devs when looking for new work to say how easy something will be and how poor the old implementation was and they will do it 10 times better, 10 times faster.
Its almost always bs.
Actual decent product available = (Initial release date + (No. of Years legacy system x 2 months) * Dev Hubris Factor)
Dev Hubris Factor = 1.5
I'm only half joking...
1st rule of business: don’t piss off customers with money to burn. You won’t get them back.
Mind blown. The app is $3.99 BTW but so far from the 5 mins I've played with it, amazing! No lag, no delay and gets right to the point. A small learning curve to figure out the features and how to group zones etc but works GREAT, Thanks!Just pay the $3 and download SonoPhone. Still uses UPNP, doesn’t use encryption, and doesn’t use the stupid Sonos cloud API where everything is relayed through now(including volume changes).
What happened to the Sonos app? A technical analysis
On May 7th, 2024, Sonos, Inc. , the successful home-audio company, released a new mobile app.www.linkedin.com
I'm only half joking...
I'll take this as joking but you're blaming the wrong people. The obviously had a hard date set on them for the release of the headphones.