I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. Sonos is the expensive brand. This isn’t cut-rate, and there’s no expectation of putting up with chinese no-name brand software garbage.
It’s absolutely incredible that they just pushed an app out that is missing significant features from the previous version. This isn’t a separate app to explore a new design. There’s no way to downgrade to the old one. This was touted as an upgrade, and the previous version even included code to give you an interstitial popup to remind you to update! There’s no warning of missing functionality!
Any competent executive will be making decisions based on data. That data should have shown how many people were using the features that are no longer included, such as a sleep timer.
This executive decided that the users of that feature were not important enough to bother supporting any more. This is an extraordinary misstep, as the people using the power-user features of the product (as if a sleep timer is fancy) are the evangelists.
I look forward to hearing how this is described as a massive business blunder in MBA schools in the future.