Prodigy III

Workaround(ish): Android App Crashing with Firmware v16.3

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 17, 2024
99 replies
6395 views

Those Android users unfortunate enough to have installed the v16.3 firmware released on 17 July may have encountered a nasty bug that crashes the app over and over. Thanks to an intrepid detective on Reddit, we’ve narrowed down the bug and identified a weak workaround.

The bug causing the crash seems to be triggered by local library music. And the local library music does not need to playing, it simply needs to be in the queue of the currently selected Sonos device.

So if you are encountering this bug and your Android app is stuck crashing ...

Using a functioning controller* clear the queuesⵜ on all Sonos devices
Start Android app, everything works!
Play streaming source, everything works!
Play local library music, BOOM CRASH BOOM

… hence “weak workaround” as local library music in your queue will continue to crash the app.

* Desktop app and Web app work particularly well
ⵜ or replace the queues with streaming music

Side note: this bug is not limited to Samsung devices, tho’ it may not impact all Android devices. Samsung devices happen to display the Android OS error message shown below, while other Android devices opt to log the error without a pop-up.

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Pinned Reply By MiniMe

Pro-Tip: briefly unpower the speaker(s) that have the track from the LAN library in their playlist. When a speaker reboots it forgets its playlist. Like this you can also recover from the Android app crashing if you don't have another working controller.

Show previous replies

R

Rhonny

Prodigy III

Music library search and playback is meant to return today in their latest app update.

S

Safa246

Lyricist III

Hmmm… Changed to Firefox but now its incredibly hard to read, and the popups dont seem to work correctly. I guess thats a problem with Firefox on Android rather than Sonos but still.

For now I will just listen to music from Spotify using the app, although a little bit annoyed that Sonos have effectively made my carefully curated over many decades investment in a few thousand CDs which I have ripped onto my NAS worthless.

Sonos, please just fix this mess!

R

Rhonny

Prodigy III

Hmmm… Changed to Firefox but now its incredibly hard to read, and the popups dont seem to work correctly. I guess thats a problem with Firefox on Android rather than Sonos but still.

For now I will just listen to music from Spotify using the app, although a little bit annoyed that Sonos have effectively made my carefully curated over many decades investment in a few thousand CDs which I have ripped onto my NAS worthless.

Sonos, please just fix this mess!

Did you see my post above your latest one?

M

Midnight

Lyricist I

While I appreciate letting us know what causes those crashes and how to work around them, it is not really an option for me. I specifically got the my Sonos devices because I wanted to stream my local music library. That’s the one reason I got them.

When their new app hit, I updated and didn’t like it. But I figured while it would have been nice to release it for voluntary use as a beta version or something, things would improve over time as they went back to fix bugs and re-introduce features that were removed. Then I found out that I could roll back to an older version and noticed just how big the differences were and how much better the older version was running. For a while I was content. I had to deactivate automatic updates and take great care not to accidentally update the Sonos app, but that was a small price to pay for being able to use it to stream my local music library again.

Then, a couple of days ago, the forced update to the new version again. And to add insult to injury, it turns out that this version of the app isn’t working with the local music library anymore at all. It feels borderline petty to disallow the old version (which obviously still worked fine with the hardware).

I wonder if there are legal steps I could take since I bought (not rented!) the hardware with a given feature-set that isn’t working as advertised anymore. And I get it, software gets updated and sometimes some features change over time to a certain degree. I’m not usually someone who sues quickly about anything (in fact, this would be the first time I did for anything) but updating the software and at the very same time adding a hard block to using the old software fully knowing that it’s badly broken in parts feels conscious, almost petty. Like they’re offended that we don’t want to use their shiny new version and so they’ll force us to use it whether we like it or not.

On that note: Does anyone here know another manufacturer who sells speakers that can be attached to a PC (or other sound source) and ethernet to play music from a NAS or whatever source is directly connected to them?

R

Rhonny

Prodigy III

While I appreciate letting us know what causes those crashes and how to work around them, it is not really an option for me. I specifically got the my Sonos devices because I wanted to stream my local music library. That’s the one reason I got them.

When their new app hit, I updated and didn’t like it. But I figured while it would have been nice to release it for voluntary use as a beta version or something, things would improve over time as they went back to fix bugs and re-introduce features that were removed. Then I found out that I could roll back to an older version and noticed just how big the differences were and how much better the older version was running. For a while I was content. I had to deactivate automatic updates and take great care not to accidentally update the Sonos app, but that was a small price to pay for being able to use it to stream my local music library again.

Then, a couple of days ago, the forced update to the new version again. And to add insult to injury, it turns out that this version of the app isn’t working with the local music library anymore at all. It feels borderline petty to disallow the old version (which obviously still worked fine with the hardware).

I wonder if there are legal steps I could take since I bought (not rented!) the hardware with a given feature-set that isn’t working as advertised anymore. And I get it, software gets updated and sometimes some features change over time to a certain degree. I’m not usually someone who sues quickly about anything (in fact, this would be the first time I did for anything) but updating the software and at the very same time adding a hard block to using the old software fully knowing that it’s badly broken in parts feels conscious, almost petty. Like they’re offended that we don’t want to use their shiny new version and so they’ll force us to use it whether we like it or not.

On that note: Does anyone here know another manufacturer who sells speakers that can be attached to a PC (or other sound source) and ethernet to play music from a NAS or whatever source is directly connected to them?

Did you not read my post a couple above yours, about today’s app update??

M

Midnight

Lyricist I

Did you not read my post a couple above yours, about today’s app update??

I’ll be happy to be proven wrong today, but somehow I’m not holding my breath. We’ll see.