Amen - well said Gradun! 

I did the update yesterday and now cannot access my music sources. 
 

I saw a couple of ‘influencers’ talking about the app updates on Youtube saying how great everything is - then you read the barrage of comments from actual users underneath - and it gets dark very quickly. What a mess!

this controller is frustrating.

If you keep swiping up in the app you can see the library ‘source’ at the bottom and the edit home option. You can bring the library source up to the top of the app using the edit home option however you can't use search on your library. That's a pretty dumb move.

May 8 and still no android update available for me here in Europe.  Thank goodness.

The new Web app is also a pile of rubbish. 

I have been back and forth as to whether or not to keep my Sonos products (five devices), or switch to Apple Home Pods.  The updated app from Sonos has helped me decide to go all in for Apple.

Why on earth should we have to open our computers to control something the whole point of which is to be able to control from your smartphone AS ADVERTISED? Epic fail, Sonos, and deliberate fraudulent advertising, imho. I want my money back.

As a retired IT exec for a wall Street bank I have been responsible for very many beta tests of new software.  The very first thing you do is to test the backup/back out plan well before you implement.  Why wasn’t this defective release immediately backed out so that corrections could be made?  I’m sure that Sonos has competent software developers, but their management is clearly a different story.

I strongly agree with Martin - the worst thing is that I can’t use my own music library in that way like I did before. 
f**k ! 🤬…

Started buying Sonos almost 20 years ago. I have 10 or 11 Sonos products in my house. I have given several Sonos speakers to each of my four children. I have given a pair of Sonos speakers to many of my nieces and nephews as graduation presents. That’s because I used to love Sonos. Now I hate Sonos. It has gone from great to absolutely terrible. Every time I go to use it there is some kind of problem requiring me to do a half hour, an hour, sometimes a day of research and work to restore things. I will never, ever, ever, ever buy another Sonos product or recommend it to anyone. I will tell anyone I can to stay away from this POS. 

In a day and age where software is constantly improving and becoming more user-friendly with new and improved features, Sonos has taken many steps backwards. I have over 15 Sonos speakers in my entire house and I’m on the verge of selling them all and moving to a different platform. The software is missing all the features that we all know and is extremely user unfriendly. The coding department really **** the bed on this one. Hopefully they find some better programmers that can relate to normal people and quickly rectify the issues before everyone jumps ship.

ME

The new App appears not to have been thought through! Where is the timer and search for products not showing in the App. Awful. 

Oh, and every song in my library comes up as "no title" when it's playing, has no options to skip to the next track & double tapping the play/pause button on my play one pauses/unpauses the track instead of skipping to the next track. It also just plays one song and does not advance to the next track. A dreadful app is one thing but you've also broken the features of the system

It’s astonishing that we’re 5months on from when this disastrous App refresh was released and there hasn’t been a real solution put on the table to recapture the excitement and faith of the customer population.  It’s all patchwork.  This is just stubborness and counterproductive. People buy new systems bc they see and hear the sound quality coming out of speakers… so they are being hoodwinked bc they get home and set everything up only to find that it’s completely unreliable bc the software is substandard.  This lagging realization is why the revenues haven’t slumped as much as the stock price… but that reputational wave is coming, bc the hardware might be good, but the software is wretched.

So let’s talk about how to solve this:

1. You can’t solve complexity head on. Release a stripped down player that is rock solid stable, that doesn’t skip or have latency lags, or make speakers disappear randomly… just get us back in the game playing our music with solid and immediate control fidelity, a simple queue, reliable service hooks, and get it playing without interruptions.  Go back to the basics.  you guys got way ahead of yourselves with useless UX “features” and tricks with advert insertion in the streams… something didn’t work right (obviously) and now we all see it’s a complex tangled mess that makes our volume controls flaky, makes our music libraries, services and speakers disappear, makes the tunes stop randomly… Strip it down and get us back playing our music without so much friction-- and the vitriol and hate for the company will start to heal.
2. Use an architecture that is truly microservices and loosely coupled components.  My guess is you guys strayed from this basic principle of building complex systems.  If you’ve tangled too many features in one component or microservice, then you can’t isolate and turn off the problem code and fix it independently. So we’re back to step 1: Start with basic core functionality, test and simplify until rock solid.  Then add back incremental functionality and battle test again.  Release a simple stable player.  The fact that you guys are taking 5mos to resolve this suggests you’re too tangled in a successor update app that is still way to monolithic.
3. Set up at least two independent solve teams. Go back to the last reliable version of the app, and let at least two different power teams innovate different fork solutions.  Let your best people do their best work unimpeded.  Clearly what happened here is Engineering got marginalized. Zero doubt that the best Engineers in the house knew this version of the app would be garbage, but they were overruled and silenced.  
4. Sonos makes money from selling hardware, not software.  So create a gateway and DRM setup that allows you to open up the ecosystem so the world out here can build our own software components (reliably!) and offer them to the Sonos community in an App Catalog.  My guess is the community is capable of producing better software than Sonos is. The gateway can require an advert stream and a secret key credential which approach is easy enough for you guys to build, and if the SDK is done right with components and libraries, then people can build their own controllers.  It is sufficiently complex enough that it becomes a filter in its own right, and ends up getting you a way to import good ideas and robust engineering from outside the company, while allowing the installed base to opt out of bad Management decisions that interfere in our lives in a way that really pisses people off.  Messing with music is messing with people’s lives and they don’t like it.  So let the installed base participate in resolving things in alternative ways… and Sonos can transition to being a company that offers components and services, and not a straightjacket walled garden.

I have been an avid Sonos user for years. The company I work for is a major supporter. Today I updated to the latest update. I have found it almost unusable, and could NOT be more disappointed. Sonos needs to work through this user experience in order to keep satisfied customers.
I will recommend, company wide, NOT to update.

Yeah completely agree. In a very similar situation myself. I just don’t bother with it anymore and use my headphones. Will be selling all my Sonos kit, except the beam as thank god it works without the app. 

I have both a Play 5 and Port on my system, but I keep finding in the new app that the Line-in option has vanished from “Your Sources”. Has anyone found a way to get it back without force-quitting the app and restarting? Even that only works 1 in 3 times.

Right, so after the toe-curling lack of contrition or understanding shown by the Sonos team on the AMA last night, my view of the current situation is: -

• The new controller app requires internet access so that our own equipment can be managed via a Sonos cloud solution.
• No warning or even hint was given in the run up to the release of the app that this would be the case.
• The release of the new version was done as a direct "upgrade" to the S2 app in the full knowledge that there would be no way back for iOS users and a manual roll back for Android devices.
• The Sonos execs, DEV and product teams knew full well that despite previous promises that existing functionality would be retained and "enhanced" in the new version, this was simply not the case.
• On the morning of the release, they pulled even more basic existing functionality yet still pushed a clearly ill thought out and immature app out to the Apple and Google app stores.
• Despite the clamour from the community on this forum, Sonos have resolutely refused to allow users that are wary of the direction of travel towards a cloud based app to remain on the S2 version for the time being.

This all displays an astonishing level of hubris, arrogance and downright contempt for their existing user base, many of whom have spent thousands of $/£ on their products.

Ignoring the functionality that has gone MIA for the time being, my main concern with the current state of affairs is that our own equipment is now directly manageable via play.sonos.com without any sort of multifactor authentication with no apparent opt out for this foolish "enhancement".  No details of the cloud service architecture and security have been provided.

Imagine this as a scenario: -

• Many Sonos users will have set up their systems over the last few years using their standard email address and a recycled password used on every other platform and service they use.  My password is long, complex and unique to my Sonos account but this will not be the case for many other users.
• If customers' Sonos kit can be accessed via the new web application portal, how long will it be before nefarious actors start to probe the new cloud service?
• Without multi-factor web authentication, re-used email address and password combinations will make remote access to Sonos equipment a doddle.
• As Sonos have recently shown, they are not the smartest of software developers so who knows what sort of security vulnerabilities are lurking in the public facing web services.
• Any number of holes in security could allow miscreants to transfer unwanted spy/malware down to our equipment that has previously been relatively isolated on our own home/office networks.

Come on Sonos, not only is this unacceptable, it places us all at risk and you, as a company, in great peril from the pasting that you would get in the courts and from the EU/US regulators.

You really do need to give your customers a breather and allow them to remain on the S2 app and associated firmware for now until the roadmap and the new controller software moves beyond a ropey alpha version.

Please put the S2 app back in the stores and allow users to only receive S2 firmware updates for Sonos devices and speakers for the time being - something along the lines of what happened with the S1/S2 debacle a few years ago.

You desperately need to regain some trust from your customers and this would, at least be a start towards this.  You also need to start publishing a much more detailed change log for software and device firmware updates with open descriptions of exactly what changes are included rather than the usual general bug fixes/feature enhancement meaningless blandishments.

Please get a grip before this whole episode puts a serious and permanent dent in your future.  If this whole artificially rushed app release is inextricably wrapped around the pending launch of your headphone product line, do you really imaging that anyone is going to be buying them until you have regained the trust of your customers?

Me too - I’ve started telling friends who are interested to avoid Sonos and I’ve started selling my Sonos products in favour of HomePods. I’ll never touch another Sonos product again. Sonos was stupid and now they are reaping the consequences - I wish it weren't so but, hey… I think its important to note that Sonos has had quality issues for a decade and that my reaction is largely a reflection of accumulated frustration - as the other posted note, getting Sonos to work is a daily chore - Sonos doesn’t “just work” (neither does Apple unfortunately) - it requires constant babysitting and intervention. There are too many friction points. And if it's true that Sonos management was warned then they got the results of their decision - apparently their stock has fallen by 30%…. I hope that gets the Sonos Board’s attention! This could've gone differently. Anyway, my frustration with Sonos is now over - all that remains is selling my remaining 6 speakers and then I’m done. I will never ever use Sonos again. 

If you want to prevent the app update from loading on your devices:

Turn off automatic updates

iOS:

https://www.lifewire.com/turn-off-auto-update-iphone-5206079 

Android:

https://www.lifewire.com/turn-off-automatic-updates-on-android-5192496#toc-how-to-turn-off-automatic-app-updates-on-an-android-phone 

(Scroll a bit further to next section titled "Stop Automatic Updates for Specific Apps")

It feels like its time to be pragmatic on this issue and look to the future.

This is not a decision that I am taking lightly.

The reality is that Sonos have won, they are not going to bring back the old app because they don’t care about me.

So from my perspective I will approach the future by:

• Suffering in silence while the New App gets fixed
• Enjoying my Sonos products as long as they continue to work and meet my needs
• Not spending another £ on Sonos for the upgrades I was considering i.e replacing my Play:!s, Play:3 and possibly the Play:5 - they all work just fine and I can live with them even if I do like the Era 100s and Era 300s
• Not spending anything with Sonos, if something breaks I’ll look on eBay and I’m pretty sure following this farce I’ll find what I need
• Finally, when my system stops working I’ll use all of the money I have saved by not getting the latest Sonos speakers to replace my entire system with something else because right now every Sonos competitor is preparing to fight to fill the void that is emerging

Over the next 3-5 years I expect to see Sonos fall behind because their loyal customers will all have a similar plan to mine so the repeat revenue will dry up and they will be totally dependent on new customers. And of course the reviews that this fiasco is generating will make it harder for Sonos to win those new customers.

RIP sonos once market leading product ruined by such an  unprofessional app upgrade it’s comical I hope the ceo falls on his sword  and customers should be compensated as we are left with a product that isn’t fit for purpose you make a executive decision from the top and reinstate the old app

The amazing thing is the complete silence from Sonos, they have completely abused customers who have invested a lot of money in their products.

I cannot understand their behaviour.

No it doesn’t.  Not if you mostly use your own music library.  The lists are still not indexed and the search function doesn’t work properly. 

It’s not much fun having to scroll through several thousand albums arranged in alphabetical order trying to locate the one you want Sonos to play.