Why I hate the new App

I am sorry, but stuttering and stopping simply cannot be caused by the new app, whatever its other faults may be.  You have two options:

1. Continue in your your false belief and therefore take no action and continue to suffer
2. Find out what the real problem is, by contacting Sonos Support or engaging with the Community to see if we can help.

Hope to hear from you.

Cliché response though this may seem, it may just require a power cycle of your router and Sonos devices, or a change to your router’s wireless channel.

Well I see John’s point, I to switched my system on this am for the first time in 2 Weeks, been on holibobs.

Only half of the speakers worked, all of the older Sonos 1’s refuse to play music. I can see them in the system, I can tweak the light and the buttons on the top, but, when I come to select them to play “Unable to connect try later” says the app. My Beam, SL1’s and Series 5 all work fine. Tried all sorts, gave up in the end and factories the lot and reimported them, all working fine now. Tell me that was nowt to do with the App upgrade. Oh and yes I did send a log to support.

​@John B you are of course correct at a purist’s technical level as the issues are most likely in the firmware that has been updated to support the new App. Before 7th May my system was stable and reliable since that date how well it works has varied with every update but it has never been stable and reliable.

Calling support would be an option if they were available at the times I’m most likely to be listening to music, but of course they are not because they basically work the same hours as I’m typically at, or travelling to/from, work 🤔

Glad it’s working, but factory resetting everything is rarely a good idea except on change of ownership.  It may just temporarily hide the real underlying issue, which then recurs.  And then you have users complaining that they are fed up of having to factory reset their system every day….

When the  Sonos system is , updated there is a lot of rebooting of speakers.  Occasionally the system router will screw up the IP address alllocation, leading to all sorts of communication difficulties.  Sonos is inevitably much more vulnerable to this, as it requires constant communication between devices, including controller devices.

Your problem may have been that, or something else.  Users have been experiencing problems like yours for as long as I have been on here, and before of course.  Their issues were caused by the major app revision earlier this year and neither were yours.  Sonos has (I think) around 16 million households worldwide using its systems.  Things go wrong.  Sometimes it is user error, sometimes it’s Sonos’ fault, or the network’s fault or nobody’s fault.

But yes, I am telling you with absolute total certainty, that your problem was “nowt to do with the App upgrade”

​@Gaham .  The problem is with your network.  You have no idea that nothing has changed.  A neighbour might have changed wifi channel to interfere with yours.  Your router may have created an IP address conflict.  

My system is as robust as ever.  I am sorry yours isn’t

What channel is your 2.4GHz wifi router using?  Try changing it.  Try rebooting router and speakers.  It may not work, but often it does.

Except the problem is not with my network ​@John B I know because I have the tools so I have checked this, joy of being at IT professional, plus everything else works fine…

WiFi controlled lights switch on instantly, Alexa can play music from Deezer seamlessly, TV programs stream without issue, but:

• Open the Sonos App and it takes at least a minute to synchronise with the speaker to display the currently playing song.
• Changing volume on Sonos will take at least 30 seconds.
• Music played on Sonos, from Deezer, will stutter and stop.

Before 7th May I did not have these issues and never had to check my network because of Sonos problems. Since 7th May it is a very different story. 

The irony is that I bought my first Sonos product because my IT illiterate brother in law got a multi room system working with zero phone calls to me, the attraction was that it just worked for anyone and that was my experience until, well you know the date already.

I’m happy for those that are not having issues but the reality is that there is something wrong with the new Sonos Firmware and App that is causing problems, that they seem unable to fix, for some users and I am one of the unfortunate ones.

And the latest set of changes (November) have made things significantly worse (for me).

If I had known you were an IT professional I would not have have bothered making suggestions you would know better than to try.

Good luck.

As with JohnB all of my Play1 speakers led lights and control buttons responded to the app, this would indicate to me that the app was in communication with the speakers over WiFi. Yet when I set the app to play music through those speakers which it just communicated with via the system control it was unable to communicate with the said speakers. Funny as this is, if I held down the play button on the said speakers it would play music. Hit pause or stop and ask the app to play music through the speaker and nope sorry cannot communicate with the speaker. My IP address ranges have not changed, my TV played absolutely fine through the surround. 
So you go ahead and assure me that the upgrade didn’t cause this and be happy in your own judgment.

I will remain sceptical.

The sad reality is that there is definitely an issue with the current App and Firmware but it is the worst type of issue because it does not impact all users which creates the illusion for some that everything is all right and means that the use case, or cases, that cause issues is not one that Sonos have a current test for. If they had a test it would be fixed.

If I was a betting man I would put my money on the way that they are handling some of the Cloud integration and that this is somehow causing some users to end up waiting for a Sonos server to respond i.e. it is outside of the user network. The bit that makes no sense to me is the “some users” aspect as logically I would expect all users to experience occasional issues not some users experience regular issues as is the current scenario. This is because I would expect calls to the Sonos servers to be distributed using a round robin algorithm.

And that last paragraph sums up what I used to love about Sonos before 7th May. I could listen to music without thinking about the IT it used😀