The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

You need to address this or you will lose yet another customer. Local media library is an absolute MUST, it is the reason I originally bought Sonos kit. Get it fixed ASAP. What a disgusting way to treat your customers.

You have just invested how many dollars in your latest headphone product yet at the same time you have removed access to local media libraries, why would I waste my hard earned pounds on headphones that don’t allow me to listen to my long collected and personal music? Additionally, I bought the Beam2 just before this appalling downgrade of the app and had I known you were about to do this, I wouldn’t have wasted my money. Just what market are you now targeting? You have alienated a huge proportion of your existing customer base and seeing this attitude towards your customer base will soon stop new customers going for Sonos products. You survived the S1 - S2 farce, will you survive this?

Wondering when the basic functionality of the new app will be fixed.  The app is completely unresponsive when you try and change the volume, it is constantly showing the wrong song playing and will not update unless you shut down app and relaunch (and even then, it takes a few times), and it does not show the actual speakers that are playing music.  So, for example, when you can hear music coming out of the sonos speakers, the app says nothing is playing, so you have absolutely no control of your system.  I have been a sonos customer and supporter for years, and I can’t believe how badly they have ruined their own product.

I recognise the delay in the system noticing a new song is playing. I do not recognise the other problems you mention - so they are not general problems (though maybe widespread). Since these maybe particular to your system or systems like yours, Sonos and you could benefit if you’d call Sonos and talk to them about the problems.

or its initial rollout, we focused on how we could answer some of the most common requests from our customers, including increased reliability, performance, and faster access to music.

Are they really listening to their customers?! I do not know if I should cry or laugh with all of this mess. Performance and reliability are two words that, at this point at least, cannot be used with this APP. 

. I do not recognise the other problems you mention - so they are not general problems (though maybe widespread).

I think you may be lucky… For me it’s far from reliable and the last update even made it worst. Opening an album it’s a lottery. 50% of the time works and the other 50 it fails with “Something went wrong”. Opening the app is also always a different outcome. Either it does not recognize my system, or fails to load artworks or favorites are not there (searching for music and navigating through services is also a mess and slow). Eventually it opens as it should. Also as pointed out by others, choosing a music to play is far from being reliable. Most of the times just plays the wrong music. So this is all less than stable and please don’t come telling me it’s a particular issue on my system or network. C’mon, I have no other problems in terms of connectivity at home and from what I can see, lots and lots of other users are complaining about similar things! And a 1.2 rating in google play store really tells the whole story!

And performance wise… My god! Terrible

I said this in another thread, I’ll say it also here. If sonos can’t handle this, please just rollback, give us a simple app to just control/configure the system and let the playback functionality for third party apps like spotify or amazon (given that sonos actually allows/supports to play music with full quality from these apps). Seriously, Sonos is not a startup (and even if it was) so I can’t really understand/believe how could they release an APP in this mediocre state. And the worse part is that updates are not improving it at all. Yes, it’s bringing more features (some of them broken actually) but the team fails to realize that they need to first fix the fundamental issues! Performance and Stability! Not being able to reliable play (or choose) a song is really ridiculous and embarrassing. And I know all this “hate” is not helpful but c’mon, sonos is really asking for it.

Long story short, I do love the sound on my era 300 but if sonos continues to fail to recognize how poor their app is, I’m not going to buy any other product from them (hopefully for me I did not really committed to sonos yet).

Update: At first glance, it looks like spotify integration works way better than Amazon but I can’t really tell since I only have subscription on Amazon so I can’t choose the music to play on spotify which almost always fail with Amazon (also get a lot more “Something went wrong”). This all means, nice to have dolby atmos speakers in theory because in practice I struggle a lot to be able to actually listen to/choose atmos music. Sight...

What is the latest on when this will be available 

The ability to downgrade a Sonos product to S1 is temporarily unavailable, but will return in a future update.

Sonos is in a bad situation. They had a solid app that performed well. For reasons I don’t know they decided they needed to build a new app from the ground up (maybe a good idea), but they decided to force release a brand new, poorly tested, buggy app, missing many features users already relied on as an update. As users installed what they thought was an update they realized they installed a brand new “not ready for prime time” app. As the complaints came rolling in from their user base they were forced to make unrealistic timelines for releases, heading down a road of “patch and release” seemingly without a normal QA, beta test and release program. Moving forward with this direction will normally result in missed deadlines and additional buggy features. 

As a long time Sonos user with a few thousand dollars invested I hope they can solve what seems to be a very difficult situation.

Hindsight might suggest they should have released the new app as S3 and maintain S2 until S3 was solid enough to attract people to upgrade to S3.

Since I’m an iPhone user who updated, I’ve decided to disable firmware updates and use an app called Sonophone until the new one is ready for prime time. It’s an adequate substitute for the old S2 version 16 app.

Just some input from a retired, career system developer.

Hindsight might suggest they should have released the new app as S3 and maintain S2 until S3 was solid enough to attract people to upgrade to S3.

I’ve no idea what were they thinking... Breaking your users like this is non sense. They should never have release a new APP (removing access to the old one) with 200% confidence it was working.

This app is a complete disaster at the moment.

If I were a new customer and didn't know how it worked before, probably I would leave Sonos.

It's just incredible this has been released in such a beta state.

Every time I open it, it shows half the enabled services. I close it and reopen and (maybe) they show up again.

A frustrating experience.

Yeah... So since I'm on android I actually managed to install the old version and I can see it's way faster starting and so far it always recognized my system. But one thing that I did noticed is that the Amazon music integration is still pretty broken. So that much seems like is not just on the new app. Is the integration done by Sonos or Amazon? Either way, even if it's done by Amazon, Sonos needs to push for some fix as Amazon was teased as a supported Dolby Atmos service. Alternatively it should just remove Amazon support because at this point it's pretty useless (then maybe they care in properly supporting it).

Right now, searching for music in Amazon fails almost all the time as well as opening albums. Sometimes the album does open (after 4/5 tries) but it takes about 10 seconds. Is someone experiencing the same?