Here's the deal, invest in your software development because it blows

I don’t think of software as an afterthought, but Sonos sells hardware, software is pretty much a necessary evil.  Sort of like how no company makes any money by having a good accounting department, but you still need it.  Sonos can’t spend a ton of money and effort chasing down the relative few odd cases where the system isn’t working correctly and rather specific home environment.  They have to focus on the system working for the vast majority of cases.  Especially since those rather specific cases tend to take the most amount of effort to resolve, if they can be resolved.

You’re thinking the Sonos system isn’t working well and easy to use for the employees?  What gave you that impression?  I would bet all, but a few exceptions, have good home networks where the system works well.  The ones that do not do to network interference from neighbors or what have you, have hard wired the system or something else.

From personal experience I know this to be nonsense.

I suggest you focus on fixing your network issues. Sonos Support have tools which can assist with this. 

Absolutely. I’m not trying to be an internet troll. But if anyone actually used this at home and had a non-engineer try to… say change the volume… they’d just put it on the lock screen. Yes, I’ve read their site and airplay mumble mumble mumble. It could work like every music or podcast or metronome or other app and just put the info where you can easily see it. But just find the app… no the Sonos app… yeah… then watch the spinner… wait for it… Change the volume… no on the screen not the volume buttons... yup it takes a few seconds… no don’t turn it off…

Again, “app volume control” is a bullet point they can claim. But try having a non techie use it and it’s clear they’ve not really put much thought into this.

As you’ve already been suggested, it seems like a lot of the issues you bring up are a result of network problems.

And it’s clear that the definition differences between a ‘remote control’ app and a ‘audio’ app are not as clear to you as they might be. Which is a challenge, as that is what Apple is focusing on to force this change. I suppose it’s possible for Sonos to throw away all the work (and speakers) they’ve created since 2005, and shift over to bog standard speakers that play in the same fashion as any other company’s, using a player on the controller device, rather than the speaker. After all, they could leverage their already existing sound design knowledge, and probably sell less expensive speakers, since they’d be able to remove the computer parts (RAM/CPU/Networking electronics) from every device. 

But that would be a major shift in their product line, and we would all lose access to all of the speakers we currently use, which might cause a bit of furor. I just don’t see such a change occurring, but who knows, maybe this relatively minor thing is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back…

Sorry, but you’re assumption that the system works poorly for employees and their households is just silly.  Your assumption that everyone, or nearly everyone, or even close to a majority, experiences the sort of issues you see and yet Sonos continues to sell speakers to new and repeat customers...doesn’t make a sense. 

I’ve heard of people having issues with airplay and seen it myself a bit. completely unrelated to Sonos, but yet millions still use it, so logically, it has to be more reliable than what my personal experience is.

If it’s network issues then they’re network issues that no wifi printer, streaming TV, phone, nest thermostat, iPad, Android tablet, or any of the zillions of devices on my home network suffer from. I did go over their their network connectivity page (this). There are lots of things I don’t know and I’m always looking to learn. But it was just the same boilerplate non-info as anywhere else.

Not a designer for Sonos, just a guy who feels shafted by their poor choices. But if what you’re describing is both cheaper and would work better then sounds like a win? 

I just want what I’m assuming is basic functionality… I connect the things to my phone and I can control them. The fact that this thread is so long sort of shows that they often don’t work that way.

26 posts is not “long”.  There once was an actual flaw in Sonos software that affected a single model, the Playbar.  That thread hit 100 pages in days, and spawned dozens of other threads on the issue.  That’s what it looks like when Sonos’ software actually has a flaw.  This is just another person who refuses to believe their network has problems.  We get them all the time.  Some listen to our advice and get fixed, others refuse and stomp off in a huff.  No skin off my nose. 

I’m all ears. What about my network could prevent the track from showing up on my lock screen? Seems to work fine on Tidal, Podcasts, Apple TV remote, etc.

Happy to do any network debugging or anything else.

IP conflicts.  Unlike most connected devices, Sonos units need to communicate between each other hundreds of times a second in order to play in sync.  If your router gets wonky and loses its address table, it can hand out new IP’s that are already in use by current devices.  This isn’t going to affect a phone or computer, because most of the time you aren’t using both at the exact same time.  It will wreak havoc with Sonos, because Sonos’ design requires the controller to be talking to all devices at once.  If two devices have the same IP, stuff starts disappearing, or running slow, or not working at all.  

So, try this that I wrote on the first page:

Reboot/power cycle your devices in the following order:

Modem
Router
Switches or hubs
Wired Sonos units
Wireless Sonos units
Computers/printers
Wireless devices - phones/tablets etc.

Allow each device to come back up before proceeding to the next.  Note you can prevent this from happening again by reserving IP addresses for your Sonos devices in your router setup.  See your router manual for instructions.

None of the devices you listed are trying to get multiple devices playing in sync over your wireless network with very minimal buffering.    If your ‘streaming TV’ was trying to get the same video playing on multiple screens wirelessly in perferct sync without issue, you would have a point.