Prominent Collaborator I

future direction for how we use sonos products

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 13, 2024
13 replies
788 views

Found this today and it actually looks reasonable from Sonos’s perspective…and from the perspective of sonos needing long-term, sustainable, service revenue from us.

again, this is not my opinion

“

After having played around with play.sonos.com

Tried it on ,

macos
ubuntu
iOS, on
1. iPad, 17.4.1, 15.8.2 - via safari/firefox - functional
2. iPad 12.5.7 - via safari/firefox loads, not functional

I am left with the impression that going forward;

the new app has the same functionality as play.sonos.com
the app is effectively a wrapper, for the web service (API)
the app is therefore limited by the lack of functionality currently available in the new web service (API)

We as users are being separated from our Sonos devices

currently we connect to the Sonos device directly on our local LAN - via the app, the player/device has it’s own operating system - you can also access it either via it’s own http server or as a DLNA/UPnP media device.
You can access your device on port 1400 (see https://bsteiner.info/articles/hidden-sonos-interface)

Going forward, we will access our devices via a SONOS API,

access to the LOCAL device via an EXTERNAL server (SONOS corporate)
We will connect to play.SONOS.com (external to LAN), who will then connect to the local SONOS device (internal LAN) - so a man-in-the-middle, round trip.

The alarm, sleep, playlist, etc. functions still exist on the actual SONOS devices - all easily accessible through the old apps.

I think this is the larger story - we get better cross platform support (win, macOS, linux, android, iOs, etc), with a unified UI/UX

However, we lose direct local access to our devices (which we bought), with a firmware update to the devices, we may well lose direct LAN access to the device

effectively meaning we may well end up subscribing to the play.sonos.com service.

I can very well see a possible future, when we have;

SONOS basic
SONOS plus, with a subscription for ‘added value’ services

This seems more than an infrastructure rebuild, it seems like a re-alignment and re-tooling of the core business model and the relationship between SONOS and it’s customers.”

Are we getting closer to understanding why this is happening to things we already bought? Hello European Union!

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Show previous replies

AlexPermit

Prodigy I

I’ve taken snippets from the AMA that I believe are relevant to this thread. All answers, understandably, from Diane

Are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience.
It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack

I noticed that the re-introduction of alarms actually required an update to Sonos devices as well as the app today. Does this mean that the new UI revamp was in fact much more than just a revamp to the UI? Are there currently bigger changes happening on the device side as well?

The app is definitely a revamp, but it’s not just the UI that changed! This new app is using new features on the speaker firmware and new cloud services as well. Let me share a bit more about what happened with alarm settings.

On the morning of the app launch, we discovered a data corruption error around the new Alarms APIs. The corruption could cause alarms to go off in the wrong room at the wrong volume with the wrong content! In order to save your alarms, we made the difficult decision to remotely disable the alarm settings feature and then completely lock it out. It allowed us to make sure your alarms stayed as they were - but at the steep cost of taking away your ability to change them yourself.

i almost always use my Sonos devices in groups, and with the new app, handling of group volumes is worse. Not only does it not change in real-time like the former app, you end up with a UI pop-up on top of the volume slider I am using to adjust the volume.

A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely. Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.

neilmcg

Enthusiast II

This would also mean they can easily roll back the app to v16.1 while keeping play.sonos.com in the air, adding back missing features, until such time that there is feature parity between the old and new environment. Only at that moment it would be appropriate to introduce a new app.

Actually I suspect this explains why they have not rolled the app back already.

If they have moved data from the local speaker network to their servers then it is likely that they have not made provision to keep that data in synch between the local and server copy and have not created a plan to merge any changes in the data that have been made on the server back to the local as part of a fall back.

Whilst I am sure that most of us users would be happy to revert to our data as it was on the 6th May I suspect there are customers that would find this problematic. Note that a global failback is a very different scenario to users using the .apk to revert to the old version.

Failing back would also assume that the data is still in place somewhere. It is possible that Sonos deleted this data from some systems once the update completed and the data was “safe” on the server. Most likely on older speakers with less memory available.

Another complication would be the way that the data is stored on the server as they may have reformatted it to optimise server performance.

As this unfolds it seems what they have not told us so far will be more worrying than what we already know.

When Diane said that about corrupted alarm data, it made sense. Previously alarm data has resided on the actual SONOS speaker, i.e. within our own LAN. How could that be corrupted on everybody's own speakers. Looks like they data dumped all that data into their servers - so it now resides outside.

That dump was corrupted.

It would make sense that they then issued a firmware update, it’ll be changing how and where the speaker looks for the alarm config file.

I see the latest update supports Apple Music Lossless, however I don’t see any release notes for the last firmware - that would be informative.

J

jorwin

Enthusiast II

This big of a change should have been communicated in technical terms and highlighted in updated privacy policies etc.
It should have been a new S3 app, and S2 should have gone into maintenance mode. That however wouldn’t have got Sonos the numbers high of users on their new system for their shareholders.

Running all that data on the cloud is going to cost money, which they will want to recoup from their customers, but who will want to pay a subscription, when we aren’t gaining anything? We had working systems before v80 that didn’t lag due to the round trip to a data centre!

Connected thermostats and cameras make sense, as you want to be able to view/adjust remotely. Speaker systems on the other hand don’t make sense, maybe apart from the headphones no one wants. However Bluetooth works perfectly fine, and not locked into an ecosystem. I don’t get the headphones USP!

Yes, those headphones. If you are out of home and want to listen to music, it may be difficult to get access to the music on your home NAS - making up a good explanation for killing the functionality of playing music from that one.

Like so many IoT devices, our Sonos devices are now prone to hacker attacks to a much higher degree than before, and our data, being kept in an unknown server space somewhere in the world can - and probably will - be stolen by hackers even from that space. Including user names, personal information, passwords, etc., but maybe also such information as home infrastructure (connected devices to the home network), that could be interesting for burglarers.

I think that this whole scenario and its perspectives will make me switch off all Sonos equipment for good, right away.

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