More abysmal update fun and games

K
Userlevel 2
Badge +4

I walked into my casita thirty minutes ago and heard my Sonos playing the local Tuscons classical radio station. I went about my morning and then just walked in again and silence...not a peep out of the player…

I grabbed my phone and started the app and saw this:

Pressing Casita led to this:

Followed by this:

Then before I could press anything this ad was rather unhelpfully thrust into my face:

To which I responded with “Not now” and then back on the prior screen I selected “More Information” to see this:

 

Pressing OK takes me back to this:

Then choosing “not now” led to this:

Selecting “Casita” leads to the entire “user experience” being repeated.

As I’ve said (and many others too) this is poor design, poor software, poor user experience it is certainly not accurate to describe Sonos as 

We’re not limited by what’s possible now. With a bold vision for the future of home sound, we’ve painstakingly invented the technology we needed to make it a reality.

 

or

We’re a spirited team of individuals who welcome challenges, take chances and never quit until we get it right. If that sounds like you, we want you on our team.

 

So, anyway, seeking info on “Error 1101” I find this official recommended course of action:

 

As I’ve said before “reboot” has become the substitute for bug fixing, for design revisioning, for quality targets, none of this matters, time and effort are not invested in these things because it is far cheaper to just tell the user to “reboot”.

This is not innovative engineering, it is poor quality, poor technical management, rushed and impatient product evaluations and so on.

It was playing, it had played all night long then out of the blue it stopped and put me in this situation, this is a product fault, it does not work as advertised…

Pull cables out of walls? seriously? is this an engineering company’s actual design? Why can’t the app instruct each device to cycle their own power connections? Why is there not at least a switch (you know those old fashioned ones that actually work by breaking the circuit galvanically) I can press to do the power cycling?

Why even bother me, so the app or a component in the mesh cannot establish a connection to Sonos HQ, OK. But so what? why can’t I just get back to playing the music I want and worry about the update later?

The actual suggestions seriously expect customers to pull power cords on modems, routers, mesh WiFi devices and so on. Then “reboot” ALL of the Sonos players, that’s four in my case all in different parts of my home.

Then “power off all unsupported network equipment” I mean FFS  guys. Notice how such “advice” invariably never ever suggests we reboot our phones, well there’s a software engineering lesson for you there if you will just open your eyes.

IT WAS PLAYING FINE UNTIL ABOUT AN HOUR AGO! I DID NOT DO ANYTHING TO IT !!

 

 

 

 

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5 replies

Jamie A
Userlevel 7
Badge +16

Hi @Korporal,

I can understand your frustration with that series of steps to take, and I appreciate that the advertising popup didn’t exactly help the situation. The Sonos App is your controller for the system and doesn’t download the update itself. Sometimes when it can’t see the system or complete an update it’s usually because of various interferences on your network. I fear that to solve this, I’ll have to give you a set of instructions, which would be following the steps in the support article:

  1. Reboot your network.
  2. Reboot your Sonos system.
  3. Close and re-open the Sonos app.
  4. Retry the update.

The article does say to reboot by unplugging from power, but you can just power your equipment off at the mains outlet.

As the article mentioned unsupported networking equipment, you can view what isn’t supported on our System Requirements page. Having unsupported networking equipment can prevent the system from functioning correctly and could be preventing the update from being delivered.

For future use, you can schedule updates or turn off automatic updates so you can update at a time that is convenient for you. This is located under Settings → System → System Updates. If the update still fails after performing the above, I’d recommend reaching out to our support team for further assistance as they have the tools available to troubleshoot this issue with you.

Thank you and I’ll make sure to share your feedback about the update sequence (and the unhelpful ad pop up) internally. I hope this information helps!

K
Userlevel 2
Badge +4

@Jamie A - Thanks for that reply. I want to add, I have several desktop Windows PCs here, one is one the same WiFi network as Sonos. I ran the desktop Sonos app on that and it was fine, it was able to see the players, did not even mention updates and I was (and still am) able to stop/start players, pair/unpair them and so on. 

From this perspective the desktop app can do something that the iOS app cannot do!

This leads me to suspect that there’s something in the design of the iOS app that wants to emphasize updates in some way, that, by design it is doing what it is and making it impossible to use the system via the iOS app.

This just adds to my sense of frustration with this entire architecture, that Sonos are doing this intentionally, sacrificing usability in order to further some internal need or goal. Why can’ the iOS app also do what the desktop app is now doing? Just let me carry on as-is?

 

jgatie

Sigh . . .

Jamie A
Userlevel 7
Badge +16

@Jamie A - Thanks for that reply. I want to add, I have several desktop Windows PCs here, one is one the same WiFi network as Sonos. I ran the desktop Sonos app on that and it was fine, it was able to see the players, did not even mention updates and I was (and still am) able to stop/start players, pair/unpair them and so on. 

From this perspective the desktop app can do something that the iOS app cannot do!

This leads me to suspect that there’s something in the design of the iOS app that wants to emphasize updates in some way, that, by design it is doing what it is and making it impossible to use the system via the iOS app.

This just adds to my sense of frustration with this entire architecture, that Sonos are doing this intentionally, sacrificing usability in order to further some internal need or goal. Why can’ the iOS app also do what the desktop app is now doing? Just let me carry on as-is?

 

Hi @Korporal,

It sounds likely that the system did update but the iOS app failed and is currently stuck. When an update is started on the Sonos system it has to finish, otherwise you’ll get an error and wont be able to use the system until you do so.

As you can use your Desktop controller without issue, this makes me believe the issue is with the iOS app. Try deleting and reinstalling the app and see if that resolves your issue. You wont lose any information as it’s stored on the Sonos System, not the app.

If you’re still having issues after re-installing the app, then I’d suggest you check the Sonos App requirements and Sonos App permissions. 

If the requirements and permissions are in order, then I’d recommend you reach out to our support team for assistance with the iOS controller not working, as they have the tools available to troubleshoot this issue with you.

I hope this helps!

K
Userlevel 2
Badge +4

Hi, and again thanks. I think there’s a deeper problem here. Time and time again the customer is burdened with doing experiments, advised to “try doing XXX” with the hope that the problem will go away.

Frankly Sonos should value reports like this, they should want to know what’s going on, what is leading to this situation rather than twiddling knobs until it all looks OK again.

I used the iOS app a week ago and it was fine, I used it to activate and pair two players in my workshop and it was fine. But two days later the playing just stopped so I opened the app to start them again and got these messages about updating (which is when I posted my OP above).

Here’s what I see now:

Somewhere in the Sonos codebase is logic that (more or less) says:

if (some_condition)
{
   message = “Needs update”;
}

The iOS app might be where that happens or it might be in the players or something, but the Windows desktop app does not show that message, it gives no hint that an update is “needed”. Clearly too an update is NOT needed because the players are playing now and the desktop app is able to stop/start them without issue:

When two UIs into the same underlying system, give contradictory views of that system’s state then there’s a problem and Sonos can fully expect customers to start complaining, a vendor like Sonos should (one would expect) be very keen to discover what that problem is and if it’s a software problem or not.

If I just fiddle around to make it go away that doesn’t fix it, it seems to me that Sonos do not care, they have bigger concerns than customer satisfaction and user experience, getting me to spend my time “resolving” things is the way they work it seems.

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