The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

Keith, I appreciate you and the team trying to stem the bleeding.  I don’t envy your position of having to clean up self-inflicted consequences from management decisions.

That said, these timelines strike me as tripling down on the tone deaf and self-congratulatory  “courageous” marketing messages being sent out.

You are telling me, the market leader Sonos speakers won’t be able to add a song to the listening queue for a month.  This capability was available last week, but no longer due to an unannounced impact of the “upgrade.”  

If I tried to suggest surprising users by taking away core functionality and promising to bring it back in a month, I’d be laughed out of a job.

The most obvious way to get back to current state parity is to provide access to the v16.1 app.  No need to rush development and testing on the v80.x.  Let those for whom the new app works continue.  Let those for whom the new app does not work migrate when core feature parity is achieved.  The last thing you want is to make the above promises and introduce new bugs.  

Yet, for unspoken reasons, this option is never mentioned.

I’m all for change and creating a new platform for the business.  I would like to see Sonos succeed.  However, I haven’t seen evidence of Sonos having the judgment to know how and when to course correct.

Best of luck.

We set out to create a more personalized and effortless listening experience with the updated Sonos app. It was rebuilt from the ground up to ensure it could support future innovation in the years to come. For 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.

Many of you have shared valuable feedback on both the improvements that have made your experience better, as well as the areas where we fell short. We are listening to all of your comments and working to address them as quickly as possible. Over the coming weeks, we will reintroduce the below features, while fixing bugs and performance issues. Thank you for your engagement and we look forward to building upon this first step to create a listening experience that meets everyone’s needs.
 

• Screen reader for visually impaired customers: May 21
• Adding and editing alarms: May 21
• Adding to queue and playing next: early June
• Sleep timer: mid-June
• Local music library search and playback: mid-June 
• Update Wi-Fi settings: mid-June

Rename the new app ‘S3’ and re-release v16.1 as ‘S2’. Sonos have voiced great confidence in the new (S3) app, and if you confidence is deserved users will gravitate there. In the meantime, users with issues can continue to use S2 and have a good experience. As S3 adds more and more working functionality, users will switch from S2 to S3.

You can do this very easily on the desktop apps.

You said “you’re unable” to add songs to a queue. You are, there is an app readily available that lets you do this right now. I don’t know if you or anyone else have a pool or an office. What I do know is that the amount of time people are spending on here saying they cant do something they could have done it 100 times over, organised a pool party and had a swim.

Why release the product when it was so obviously half baked?  Just please roll things back to a usable version and release the current thing as a public beta. It is useless. Please don’t steal months of time from people that have spent thousands of dollars on Sonos simply because of some mistake. 

Thousands of dollars spent. Future dollars likely to spend - currently zero.