Android Devices no longer can connect to SonosNet

I understand that you need to make room for new features to be able to be competitive on the market.
But, let me as a customer chose. It's completely ok for me IF you tell me "If you want Google assist, then you can't use sonosnet". Fine, then I make the choise to being able or not to use Google assist.
Let your customers choose!You csnnot hsve user specific firmware. This is a completely impracticable request. This request could be made for any and every festure, not just the one that happens to matter to you at this time. Just impossible.

Not impossible at all. Our company uses that technic every day. Customers choose which modules/features they need för their business. And we also say "feature A is not possible to combine with feature B, select only one of them"
It works great. 🙂

Yes, it could be possible, hardly anything is impossible given enough time and money. But in the case of Sonos it is impractical to fork firmware for such a devices.

Sonos has a model that enables ALL it's Smart speakers ever produced to still function fully as part of their Home Speaker solution. Some of those models are more than 10 years old and so have limited memory and processors compared to the latest models. They have probably decided that Home automation is a higher priority than Sonos net access, and given there are alternatives to Sonos Net they are probably right. Some more notice would not have gone amiss though.

I don't know what business you are in but if you have a model where you can customise such things then that would have been part of the design at the outset. Forking code, for software or firmware, is rare practice in IT companies I have worked in and is used as a short term fix only normally.

I understand that you need to make room for new features to be able to be competitive on the market.
But, let me as a customer chose. It's completely ok for me IF you tell me "If you want Google assist, then you can't use sonosnet". Fine, then I make the choise to being able or not to use Google assist.
Let your customers choose!You csnnot hsve user specific firmware. This is a completely impracticable request. This request could be made for any and every festure, not just the one that happens to matter to you at this time. Just impossible.Not impossible at all. Our company uses that technic every day. Customers choose which modules/features they need för their business. And we also say "feature A is not possible to combine with feature B, select only one of them"
It works great. 🙂
Application software modules is one thing. This approach would be utterly impractical for embedded firmware images in a heterogeneous network system.

As it is, there are different images for each hardware target. Imagine the complexity of providing images for every permutation of features, for each platform. On top of which each firmware variation would have to be regression tested on the network against every other variation, running on every other device. It would consume so much resource no release would ever make it out the door.

Not impossible at all. Our company uses that technic every day. Customers choose which modules/features they need för their business. And we also say "feature A is not possible to combine with feature B, select only one of them"
It works great. 🙂

Uh huh. And your company gives it away for free, making all its revenues from hardware sales, like Sonos does? And it does this for embedded firmware?

The idea that a user could be offered a choice between Google Assistant and Android connection to SonosNet, as if these were separate software modules, is utterly ludicrous.