The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

Or — how about you fire your designers and use well established platform paradigms that aren’t terrible or absurd?

I’m beyond baffled on how Sonos isn’t acknowledging the UI/UX paradigm isn’t a sheer mistake of utter arrogance and the general new low standard butt end of a joke on what not to do in almost every dev group I’m in.

The entire UI/UX should be rolled back, not tweaked.

This response is embarrassingly tone def and comes across as doubling down.

The app is simply not functional at the moment. Why not give people an option to use the previous, working app in the meantime?

Keith, this is a lame excuse for a mea culpla. You have not apologized to your customers which suggests to me you really don't understand the impact your (reckless) actions have had.

On top of basic features not working, which is messing with our sleep timing, alarms, music habits, etc. the system is now horribly unstable. On my Samsung, it opens about 20% of the time, on my Ipad closer to 60%. I have stopped the update on my PC, but really at 3 am when insomnia hits booting up the laptop to hear a podcast is a real pain.

Maybe you don't get how much your customers use your system to meet daily needs. If you had done proper user testing you would never have released this inferior product.

I don't care about the user interface, I could use the old one and (if it worked) I can learn the new one. I care about features and stability, neither of which you have anymore.

Your timelines extend well beyond my dump Sonos completely and find another system.timelone,  spending a lot of money and damaging your brand for .e immeasurably. 

Please allow us to revert to the old version while you clean up this debacle. 

And, do real user testing next time, that is business 101, but it seems Sonos forgot that part.

UGGHHHHHH!

Hi @Keith N - any word if returning media controls in the Android notification centre and lock screen are on the roadmap?

They aren’t apologizing, the official response from management is removing these features took courage.
 

They are now trying to change the channel, whitewash May 7 and  move the focus to May 21 when features will allegedly start to come back. 

A someone that remembers the S1/S2 mess, this reminder is perfect. Ouch!

Well, you failed miserably on all fronts. Roll back, apologize, redesign from scratch.

It also speaks volumes that none of the executives could be bothered to address the community in any way. Feels like, we already got your money, now go play with your broken toys and be quiet.

increased reliability, performance, and faster access to music.

Failed, failed and failed.

We are listening to all of your comments and working to address them as quickly as possible.

You’re not. Well *you* might be listening but the powers that be are not.

I don’t envy your job at the moment, nor that of the other members of the community team at times like these, but I’m not sure how much these statements help. You tell me you’re listening then tell me that basic functionality is a month away and that big fixes are will happen in the coming weeks (next week, 7 weeks time?). In the meantime 2/3 of my system is basically unusable. Sonos has, to all intent and purposes, bricked many peoples systems. Regardless on views of app design, missing features, etc, you have rendered people’s hardware unusable and are offering no interim way of using it. The overriding request has been to rollback/re-release the old S2 app until you have fixed things and release an “S3” app when it’s actually ready. In my opinion that’s the only request you should be listening to.

Here’s my feedback to your senior team: I’ve been a UK customer since ~2008 but this is the sour cherry on an increasingly stale cake. I’m done.

This fiasco can destroy company reputation overnight. The Head of Product has a lot of answer for and i expect they are squarely on the line for this absolute disaster of a product release.

Anyone buying a new Sonos will be automatically put off with how poor the new app is. 

Annoyingly, people like me with 16+ devices are stuck with the mess this app is.

Poor UXUI, buggy, unstable. It’s shoddy.

I am in the process of renovating my home with Sonos designed throughout, however if this the future of the product, I will genuinely seek alternative products.

Finally, I will say on your press release, you stated “…this took courage.”

No. It took utter poor planning, ego trips and stupidity to release the app in the state it’s in.

As a Head of Product with 15 years of experience, you messed up. Badly.

CRAP!