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Sonos App Redesign AMA

Sonos App Redesign AMA
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A
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?

Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.

Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

 

 

Bring back the old Sonos app. It was clunky, but it actually worked!
P
Userlevel 5
Badge +1

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

I was able to roll back on android without issue and I’m staying rolled back.

 

me too, i can’t believe there has been no apology for any inconvenience caused just pig headedness, i’m so done with sonos 

DianeRoberts
Userlevel 4
Badge

Hi AMA team!
I almost always use my Sonos devices in groups, and with the new app, handling of group volumes is worse. Not only does it not change in real-time like the former app, you end up with a UI pop-up on top of the volume slider I am using to adjust the volume. See the video below of before and after. Will this be fixed in a future app update? 

@mdpeterman 

A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely.  Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.

Thank you for sharing the videos. I will make sure the team sees these so that we can continue to iterate and improve in upcoming releases.

J
Userlevel 3

You’ve made our speakers open to the internet via the new web app without our consent and without two-factor authentication for security.
You’ve demoted local library music so much that it’s practically impossible to find our music (no search, poor A-Z scrolling) plus there is no way to update the index of the library.

 

Is this legitimate? Can you provide more info on how this is happening? Highly concerning.

Go to play.sonos.com, log in. See your speakers. Do it from outside your network, still see your speakers. 
There is no tfa or mfa options, only password. This is not good security practice. 

Can we please get a response from the sonos team on this?

J
Userlevel 5
Badge

Imagine your spouse says “I don’t like how dated our kitchen is. The countertop layout is awkward & our appliances are out of date.”

Instead of working with them to remodel the kitchen, you build a brand new house with a modern kitchen, but no air conditioning, no garage, no heat, and no windows. 

You don’t ask your spouse if that is OK, you simple drive them to the new home, tell them that the old one is sold, and that you promise you’ll eventually get air conditioning, heat, a garage, and windows. But look how nice the kitchen is!

I think you know your spouse’s reaction to such a move, and I hope that helps you understand what your customers are feeling. 

Y
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

Well, I rolled back to the previous version a couple of hours after the upgrade, and I have had no issues at all. 

C
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

What was the thought process behind releasing the app update in an obviously unfinished state, instead of waiting for critical issues to be resolved?

Thank you @veryblocky @YorkSteve @umiami91. Since you all had similar questions, I’d like to answer them together.

An app is never finished! 

It’s probably a good idea to give you some background. This is a new app - we started from an empty project file. As the project progressed, we stopped investing our time in the old app code. Over time we “cross-faded” our engineering attention into the new app. We need to make the new app be the app going forward so we stop splitting our attention.

We decided that now is the moment to bring you the new app. This is the beginning, and we will be continually iterating going forward. As I said - an app is never finished.

Are you kidding? Sure an app may never be "finished," but there is a substantial portion of development that can be categorized as "not yet ready to release to users". Then, at some point in the process you reach "ready to release." Why did you choose to release this one when you were clearly not even halfway through that first portion of development?

Seriously, if this is your response, then why didn't you just release a blank page first that has no code? And maybe then the next day you'll release the first initial attempts of some code? And then a few more lines of code in a day or two? Always saying "soon it will be functional, promise! An app is never finished!"..... You're maybe going to say that it should have some functionality before you actually give it to customers? Then you must have some way to assess the appropriate level of functionality for release, right?. The complaint here is that you clearly release this long before you reached that point!

"An app is never finished" ....That is the most insulting answer I could possibly imagine that these developers could put on this forum.

Bumper

Sonos now claims that some of the most serious defects will be corrected in the 21 May release, but hopefully the panel can understand that there are a lot of blind people who can’t trust Sonos anymore. Given that Sonos got it so horribly wrong with this current release, why should we expect anything better in the next?

Will Sonos offer an apology to its blind users and accept that it got this wrong, and will Sonos commit to creating a Chief Accessibility Officer as a tangible commitment to ensuring this never happens again?

 

@jmosen

Thank you for your heartfelt feedback. 

 

We invested our user experience and engineering energy on supporting VoiceOver throughout this project. Unfortunately near the end, we took our eye off the ball and missed a couple of key bugs. Those bug fixes have been shipped in a release today.

 

That doesn’t mean we’re done. We have more that we want to do and will do to fine-tune the experience. This is the same kind of fine-tuning we are doing for the visual experience. In a visual UI that means adjusting the gutters between items on screen. In a spoken UI it means adding more hints about how to navigate. We look forward to tweaking those and making the experience get continually better.

I understand that we have to rebuild your trust. We will only be able to do that by improving the experience. Any words we say will be incomplete. I am sorry that we missed this.

 

Our next step involves building a hearty beta community of vision impaired users. Today we have 30 visually impaired users on the beta of the next version of the app. The next version already has several improvements beyond the bug fixes we shipped today.


 

“Eye off the ball” means that the app was not ready but was still released on a set date regardless. 

Also known as DGAF

S
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

how about solving

  • systems where the app cannot see/add the speakers
  • sometimes sysem is only emerging after 15 minutes
  • Also a niced feature would be volume control. Now the lag can be 20 seconds

These points  make a system unusable

P
Userlevel 4
Badge +2

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

Well, I rolled back to the previous version a couple of hours after the upgrade, and I have had no issues at all. 

The old app works better than the new one, which frequently lost the speakers on my network unless I restarted the app. No such problem on old version since I rolled back

I
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

Does the firmware get updated when we update the app, or is there a separate behind-the-scenes update going on?  if the former, then I assume we will be ok on 16.1 as long as we don’t need the new functionality. if the latter.. can we disable the firmware updates? with a library off over 35k tracks, I want to be able to use it in the way that it currently works, and if that means staying with 16.1 for the future, thats fine with me.. I don’t do much streaming at all, I have. working version (I back-revved to 16.1) and can happily stay there.

C
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Sonos now claims that some of the most serious defects will be corrected in the 21 May release, but hopefully the panel can understand that there are a lot of blind people who can’t trust Sonos anymore. Given that Sonos got it so horribly wrong with this current release, why should we expect anything better in the next?

Will Sonos offer an apology to its blind users and accept that it got this wrong, and will Sonos commit to creating a Chief Accessibility Officer as a tangible commitment to ensuring this never happens again?

 

@jmosen

Thank you for your heartfelt feedback. 

 

We invested our user experience and engineering energy on supporting VoiceOver throughout this project. Unfortunately near the end, we took our eye off the ball and missed a couple of key bugs. Those bug fixes have been shipped in a release today.

 

That doesn’t mean we’re done. We have more that we want to do and will do to fine-tune the experience. This is the same kind of fine-tuning we are doing for the visual experience. In a visual UI that means adjusting the gutters between items on screen. In a spoken UI it means adding more hints about how to navigate. We look forward to tweaking those and making the experience get continually better.

I understand that we have to rebuild your trust. We will only be able to do that by improving the experience. Any words we say will be incomplete. I am sorry that we missed this.

 

Our next step involves building a hearty beta community of vision impaired users. Today we have 30 visually impaired users on the beta of the next version of the app. The next version already has several improvements beyond the bug fixes we shipped today.


 

“Eye off the ball” means that the app was not ready but was still released on a set date regardless. 

Diane,

Are you ‘falling on the sword’ for someone else’s poor decision making?

thank you 

KateW
Userlevel 2
Badge

What data did you draw on to justify this new design? Was there any information architecture analysis done? Was there any investigation at all, like user interviews, analytics, usage data, etc?

The marketing materials tout “no more tabs” as a selling point, but for me it’s one of the biggest UX regressions. The new home screen is worse than useless; it’s just a new barrier between me and the favorites screen, which is by far the most common place I’m trying to go in the app besides the now-playing screen.

 

Hello @f8dee28e-f9a0-4157-a141-ce8859 

We did go through multiple phases of assessing the current S2 structure, modified versions of it, and the tabless version that we have today. Our work has engaged existing and new Sonos users throughout, and we have pursued the path that felt the most useful and intuitive to the largest number of users overall. We understand that every user is an individual with unique needs and circumstances. My hope is that your specific needs can be addressed by personalizing your home screen so your Sonos Favorites module shows up front and center on your home screen. Doing so should make this the first thing you see when launching the app. A single tap should take you to the full view of that collection. 

 

UX at Sonos
S
Userlevel 4
Badge

You’ve made our speakers open to the internet via the new web app without our consent and without two-factor authentication for security.
You’ve demoted local library music so much that it’s practically impossible to find our music (no search, poor A-Z scrolling) plus there is no way to update the index of the library.

 

Is this legitimate? Can you provide more info on how this is happening? Highly concerning.

Go to play.sonos.com, log in. See your speakers. Do it from outside your network, still see your speakers. 
There is no tfa or mfa options, only password. This is not good security practice. 

Can we please get a response from the sonos team on this?

I asked similar also on Page 5. What drove such a lax attitude to exposing your customer’s own hardware and networks to the outside world behind a simple username/password?

S

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

I was able to roll back on android without issue and I’m staying rolled back.

 

SJBill, could you please post for everyone how you rolled back to the earlier version.  I’m sure most customers would prefer to do that at this point.  I think I’ve heard that only works for Android, but let’s at least get the word out how to do that.  Hopefully someone can also figure out a way for Apple users too.

From the reddit thread on this: 

 

From the link below download/install the 16.1 (arm64-v8a) version of the APK file and turn off auto updates.

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/sonos-inc/sonos-for-android/sonos-for-android-16-1-release/sonos-16-1-android-apk-download/

S
Userlevel 7
Badge +3

What was the thought process behind releasing the app update in an obviously unfinished state, instead of waiting for critical issues to be resolved?

Thank you @veryblocky @YorkSteve @umiami91. Since you all had similar questions, I’d like to answer them together.

An app is never finished! 

It’s probably a good idea to give you some background. This is a new app - we started from an empty project file. As the project progressed, we stopped investing our time in the old app code. Over time we “cross-faded” our engineering attention into the new app. We need to make the new app be the app going forward so we stop splitting our attention.

We decided that now is the moment to bring you the new app. This is the beginning, and we will be continually iterating going forward. As I said - an app is never finished.

I do not care in the slightest that it was built from the ground up (and, frankly, it feels like it was built from the ground down to about six feet under).  And no one knows or cares what “cross-faded” means here.  You are obviously a product manager not worthy of that title since you have managed your product into the ground.  You removed many, many features that are basic to the most rudimentary sound systems.  You made us your beta testers.  You say that you are going to incrementally bring functions back in the future.  But that is completely worthless to say since those features already existed in the old app.  Sonos is non-courageous, self-serving, completely blind to customer loyalty and needs, etc., etc., etc.  A total test case on how not to retain customers.

N
Userlevel 2
Badge

Sonos now claims that some of the most serious defects will be corrected in the 21 May release, but hopefully the panel can understand that there are a lot of blind people who can’t trust Sonos anymore. Given that Sonos got it so horribly wrong with this current release, why should we expect anything better in the next?

Will Sonos offer an apology to its blind users and accept that it got this wrong, and will Sonos commit to creating a Chief Accessibility Officer as a tangible commitment to ensuring this never happens again?

 

@jmosen

Thank you for your heartfelt feedback. 

 

We invested our user experience and engineering energy on supporting VoiceOver throughout this project. Unfortunately near the end, we took our eye off the ball and missed a couple of key bugs. Those bug fixes have been shipped in a release today.

 

That doesn’t mean we’re done. We have more that we want to do and will do to fine-tune the experience. This is the same kind of fine-tuning we are doing for the visual experience. In a visual UI that means adjusting the gutters between items on screen. In a spoken UI it means adding more hints about how to navigate. We look forward to tweaking those and making the experience get continually better.

I understand that we have to rebuild your trust. We will only be able to do that by improving the experience. Any words we say will be incomplete. I am sorry that we missed this.

 

Our next step involves building a hearty beta community of vision impaired users. Today we have 30 visually impaired users on the beta of the next version of the app. The next version already has several improvements beyond the bug fixes we shipped today.


 

How does one join this beta community as a vision impaired user and how will you prioritize vision impaired users to join? ...Also, thank you for answering Jonathan’s question with some soul, that does not go unnoticed.

C
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

At a minimum, we want ACKNOWLEDGEMENT that you know this is bad!  Otherwise are we supposed to be able to trust that you'll ever make it good? You clearly don't know what good is. 

Some acknowledgment that this app is broken would tell us you can be trusted to have some standards in the future. But if you can't even acknowledge that this is bad, then it's clear you have no idea how to make a decent app and I'm really looking into alternatives now.

 

(If you need a bottom-line reason to be decent and honest: There's plenty of research that shows that merely giving apologies for screwups makes customers a lot less angry at any kind of provider. Even doctors who have made terrible mistakes in the operating room are less likely to be sued for malpractice if they simply apologize and empathize. Failure to acknowledge wrongs harms your business)

 

 

R
Userlevel 5
Badge +4

P*ss off your customer base so that the app is compatible with your forthcoming headphones (that no one is going to want to buy now)!

S
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

I was able to roll back on android without issue and I’m staying rolled back.

 

SJBill, could you please post for everyone how you rolled back to the earlier version.  I’m sure most customers would prefer to do that at this point.  I think I’ve heard that only works for Android, but let’s at least get the word out how to do that.  Hopefully someone can also figure out a way for Apple users too.

There are a number of threads elsewhere on the forum which link to an archive of older versions of the Android app on apkmirror.com

Folks running the Android app on ChromeOS are out of luck, though, unless they want to factory reset their Chromebooks to put them into developer mode (haven’t taken that step yet).

I believe iOS app installation policies also make side loading like this harder to impossible but others with iOS devices will have to speak to that.

F
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Tucker, you don’t have to roll back the App. You just need to place v16.1 back into the App store and download sites with a different name like S2.16.1

That way both Sonos and it’s Customers can have access to prior and new Apps simultaneously.

D
Userlevel 2
Badge +1

My sytem sound terrible.  Hard resetting. And adding the subs took all day. 
how can you release this terrible update. It ruined my sytem.  It sound like cheap sytem. 

You will lose allot of customers. This is outrageous!!!
 

 

G
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Sorry Sonos, as a customer since 2006 with a large(ish) setup. My faith was knocked after S1 to S2 forced upgrade, then we didn’t see anything new from S2. Now my expensive new S2 system you forced me to buy, isn’t working. And the irony, my S1 system in my offices are working fine! How can we ever trust you?

J
Userlevel 2
Badge

Hi AMA team!
I almost always use my Sonos devices in groups, and with the new app, handling of group volumes is worse. Not only does it not change in real-time like the former app, you end up with a UI pop-up on top of the volume slider I am using to adjust the volume. See the video below of before and after. Will this be fixed in a future app update? 

@mdpeterman

A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely.  Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.

Thank you for sharing the videos. I will make sure the team sees these so that we can continue to iterate and improve in upcoming releases.

 

Even if it was a rewrite, why was functionality removed that was present in the prior app?  In what world do you come from where existing functionality is not present in a subsequent release?

I’ve been a SW engineer for 35 years and I’ve never seen such a terrible release in my entire career.

Completely unacceptable

G
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

Well, I rolled back to the previous version a couple of hours after the upgrade, and I have had no issues at all. 

Same here.  I rolled back and will stay rolled back.  The issue is that I will keep being told to upgrade.  I would prefer to not have that constant niggle.  However, I’m the same as you - rolled back and staying at 16.1.

 

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