What stops Sonos from making the old app available?

For sure it’s ego. Any well thinking person would not let down all their customers and their own support groups as well. 

It’s not on-strategy. They have future plans for hardware (including the recent Ace) that require a different fundamental framework for their current and future speakers to work. The CEO acknowledged in detail this week the impact of the app release and the £20-30m involved in fixing things. But the old app will not come back. I’m not sure why people are still convinced it’s an option.

I suspect it would require a whole bunch of modifications to make it work, and take away resources that would be working on the newer version. I also suspect the amount of effort to ‘revert’ is substantially more than to continue to move forward with the current version. 
 

As @Rhonny says, there is an extensive discussion about the impact this has been made in the Quarterly guidance. Rather than release two new devices that are ‘ready’, Sonos is devoting all their attention to fixing this issue. 

It’s mainly a lack of knowledge about what is involved behind the scenes, how things are designed and operate and the impact across the business not only on the technical side involving the platform & work involved. There is for example, the knock-on effect to an already overloaded support team who then have to first figure out which version people are actually using when they call. S1, old S2, new S2, rolled back S2? beta S2?

From the outside it’s an easy button push so why hasn’t anyone done it.

At least an app roll back seems a reasonable, if futile request, from the outside. Try explaining to someone who spent their entire working life in publishing, preparing documents for paper print, where everything needs to be perfect, font size, page position, colour codes etc that for online/electronic publishing

• why it isn’t a reasonable request for the developers to move a layout half a pixel left?
• why the shade of red they see on their monitor isn’t the same as the shade of red their work colleague beside them sees and is different to the masters they use as reference?
• why measuring the distances in ebooks displayed on their monitor or after printing the ebook doesn’t match their view of what the page layout distances should be

The dreaded request every developer hears is when someone waltzes in and opens with a ‘can you just change this… It’ll be easy and won’t take you long’ 

Can I just say ‘Amen’ ….

I'm hindsight I'd bet there are a lot of folks that think doing a clean break, as with the S1 S2 change would have been less painful for all involved.

Folks with headphones would have to use the new (S3?) app while the rest could stay with what was working.

A feature freeze on the S2 app like S1 has would be necessary and a end-of-life could be set at some point after the new app was feature complete and debugged.

I've worked a lot of "can't fail" projects where running the old and new in parallel was the only acceptable option, and done until proper operation of the new system was fully verified. Expensive, more work but safer.

Well stated @Stanley_4. Revamping the apps and the device firmware and the cloud infrastructure simultaneously was not a formula for success. 

They’ve plain and simple massively screwed it up. 

The reason people keep asking for the old S2 back is because Sonos have done it before with the S1 to S2 transition so it doesn’t seem like it’s a new ask, and unless you’ve bought the headphones, you’d much rather have a working functionally frozen system than the current mess. I don’t think anyone is asking to go back to May S2, re-fork and add the headphones to that, just to be able to control and use their existing systems properly again. Given that they’ve re-written/launched the S2 to S1 downgrade tool, a tool to put S2 systems back to 16.1 with the 16.1 app, with the update function disabled, doesn’t seem like a huge stretch. 

Sonos are losing existing revenue anyway, as trying to update your system with new stuff when it isn’t working is far fetched… At least existing customers might start buying upgrades again if they have faith they can actually get the new kit to work. I expect the no. of headphones they need to sell now to cover the $30m additional app costs have wiped out profit there for a while, with a lack of existing upgrades kicking in just in time for the holiday season run up. Add in to the mix the fact that well known tech sites/blogs are starting to actively discourage you from buying Sonos because of the app and I’d say launching ‘S2 Classic’ temporarily might not be a bad thing.

If nothing else it might allow a lot of people to get control of their systems back to be able to update in future. If you’re one of the people with such severe issues the app can’t even see all your system reliably, how do you update the speakers? An S2 Classic with a firmware downgrade tool would at least get some consistency back. 

And it would offer a way forward for those of us that have seen the mayhem and decided to revert to 16.1 ourselves (i.e. those lucky enough to revert the app before accepting firmware updates).

As it stands, we can’t ever update again without risking breaking a system that works, and we can never add any more Sonos gear to our system, because if that new gear has different firmware, we will be forced to update the entire system’s firmware.

But, despite the existence of sound arguments for a reversion tool, it won’t happen. Too many big egos in control, is my guess.

I wish they would do sonething. My system does not work.  

They are, practically every week.