They say they can’t.  Which we all know is a lie.  That or they are even more inept than the crappy new app indicates.

Does anyone know if initiatives have been taken to prosecute Sonos for making our paid equipment worthless?

I guess we could join forces and take legal measures.

There have been many suggestions for a class action. Several have said they’re taking legal advice. Despite requests for updates none have come back to say they’ve started a private or a class action claim. Nor have any users within the legal profession given any advice. 
 

While waiting, submit a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (or, if you’re not in the U.S., the local equivalent). “Bad business practices” are within the FTC purview, and a few thousand filings from angry SONOS customers might get their attention. The key point to highlight is that unilateral and arbitrary action on the part of SONOS suddenly caused your well-functioning home audio system to stop working. No need to worry whether what SONOS did was or wasn’t “legal”; that’s for the FTC to figure out.

Why would Sonos lie about this?  It would be a huge win for them if they could do this.

 Yes, they could roll all the app software and speaker firmware back to a previous version, but this is creates it’s on problems.  Everyone who owns an Ace now can’t use their headphones with sound bars, which is obviously a problem for a company that makes profit from product sales.  Also, everyone who has a bug fix since this rollback release has had their issue reintroduced.  You’re trading off one group of upset customers for a different set, and it’s not like the first group is going to be all forgiving and happy with Sonos anyway.

What Sonos looked at doing is seeing whether they old app software could work with current speaker firmware.  They found that there were too many issues that would need to be resolved.  Time spent resolving this issues for software that they intend to sunset in the near future is better spent on resolving issues with the current app software.  There does come a point when the time and effort to go back is more than it is to go forward.  Bad decisions were made, and unfortunately, the ship has sailed for undoing those bad decisions.

I agree with you. They don’t want to impact Ace sales, they are already way less than they hoped unfortunately.

Arc Ultra and Sub Gen4 releases also seem imminent as they leaked the product pages on their webstore on Sunday ($1199 for Arc Ultra). I hope these products don’t suffer the same fate as Ace whenever they are released as we need Sonos sell these like crazy to remain financially healthy for them to continue to fix their mess.