Sonos Corporation's True Agenda

G
Userlevel 4
Badge

With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

 

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

 

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

 

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

27 replies

T
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

I will not be purchasing any more Sonos equipment.

E
Userlevel 4
Badge

Your theory is sound and depressing.

K

But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music.

Interesting theory. The only thing to contradict is this: 95% plus of the Sonos user base today does not have their own music they listen to, they pay for services or use radio stations.

But nothing of the rest of what you say is as outlandish as it first seems.

M
Userlevel 4
Badge

I fully agree that it was a disastrous roll out. I also believe some of the ideas about the direction that Sonos is probably heading (service oriented revenus), but that does not explain the lack of testing (apps crashing to the point I had to uninstall/reinstall) and missing features (alarm, play list management and other goodies). Some food for thought.

The new Sonos apps has been built from scratch, probably due to their changing software toolchain, development environment and process. Porting code from one development environment to another is not always possible. Also, note the release number format which has changed from a simple "16.1" to "80.00.04-release+yyyymmdd-build_number". Sonos took the opportunity for an UX relayout, to be trendy, which is not trivial and requires "hands-on" testing. This might be a wild guess, but the fact that the UX is slow/lagging prompt me to believe that new hooks are in place to keep track on usage of certain features.

Overall, yes it does takes courage to rebuild a brand`s core product, but Sonos either underestimated what the core product baseline includes (by ommiting features that their customers loved) or Sonos simply draw the line on the release content driven by other upcoming events (to support new product launch dates).

Sonos have been ambitious, but failed delivering the quality that their customers are expecting from their products. Sonos could have decided to leave alone Sonos S2 (and stop any fixes and dev on that version) and release a new Sonos apps only when it is functionnaly "at par" with Sonos S2. It was a conscious decision on their part, with the result we all experienced.

I would really like to be in their post-mortem release meeting just to hear the famous "I told you"... ;-)

Again, this is just my opinion.

A
Userlevel 6
Badge +6

With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

 

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

 

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

 

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

Welcome to the forums.  I understand your anger and while it is valid maybe there are now dozens and dozens of posts which point to the reality of the matter.

It would be really helpful if everyone understands that features have not, I repeat *not* been removed.  There has been no new firmware to the amps and speakers and their inherent functionality is 100% unchanged.  So, alarms have not been removed, local libraries have not been removed, playlists (which are stored on the devices) have not been removed.  They remain present in the underlying OS — completely unchanged.

 

The app has been completely rewritten, and for whatever reasons that we can only speculate about, it has been released before some of functionality of the old app had been reinstated.  Yes, to the end user it makes no difference if the functions are not there, but it is because they have not been written in, not because they have been removed.  

 

the timeline for updates which replace current absent functionality has already been stated.   

So many new users posting of not buying Sonos ever again, selling or dumping their gear when the timeline for reinstating those missing features is in weeks.  We shouldn’t have to wait those weeks, but it looks like that is the reality of where we are.  

The whole ethos of Sonos is that it is service agnostic.    And yes Sonos would like some of that revenue stream too, hence Sonos radio.  There is no evidence that the open platform for other services is changing.  
 

I’m not defending the indefensible — the new app is ln’t ready.  But while I can’t see into the future, I’m prepared to wait the few weeks for the promised changes.  And besides, even as it is I can use my local library and use all my services.  
 

 

 

T
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Sonos have effectively stolen weeks of full use of purchased equipment, and that is best case scenario. Their behaviours is appallin.

G
Userlevel 4
Badge

With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

 

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

 

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

 

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

Welcome to the forums.  I understand your anger and while it is valid maybe there are now dozens and dozens of posts which point to the reality of the matter.

It would be really helpful if everyone understands that features have not, I repeat *not* been removed.  There has been no new firmware to the amps and speakers and their inherent functionality is 100% unchanged.  So, alarms have not been removed, local libraries have not been removed, playlists (which are stored on the devices) have not been removed.  They remain present in the underlying OS — completely unchanged.

 

The app has been completely rewritten, and for whatever reasons that we can only speculate about, it has been released before some of functionality of the old app had been reinstated.  Yes, to the end user it makes no difference if the functions are not there, but it is because they have not been written in, not because they have been removed.  

 

the timeline for updates which replace current absent functionality has already been stated.   

So many new users posting of not buying Sonos ever again, selling or dumping their gear when the timeline for reinstating those missing features is in weeks.  We shouldn’t have to wait those weeks, but it looks like that is the reality of where we are.  

The whole ethos of Sonos is that it is service agnostic.    And yes Sonos would like some of that revenue stream too, hence Sonos radio.  There is no evidence that the open platform for other services is changing.  
 

I’m not defending the indefensible — the new app is ln’t ready.  But while I can’t see into the future, I’m prepared to wait the few weeks for the promised changes.  And besides, even as it is I can use my local library and use all my services.  
 

 

 

The playlists and music libraries are still there, but it doesn’t make any difference if the users can no longer delete, add, modify or search them. I am still convinced that the missing parts are intentional as part of their eventual plan to charge customers to use their services, and eventually their speakers. The trivial items like alarm and sleep timers can be added later as an after thought. But the version they rolled out now is basically going to be the same next year as it is now. No where in the Corporate announcements did they address a fix to the lack of control over playlists and libraries. And as you know, Sonos has complete control over whether or not your speakers will function. They can force their customers to do updates. As probably 90% of Sonos users only use streaming services, many of the changes in corporate direction will have little effect on them. But for those of us with our own music libraries, these changes are highly problematic. As the smart folks always say, follow the money. 

Bumper
Userlevel 7
Badge +16

 

 

 

. 

@Gee 2024 

They have announced that some of the missing features are coming back within a few months

But agree  companies dont just put web apps together and then offer them for free forever. Sonos likely has a plan to monetize this in some way beyond hardware sales, otherwise imo they wouldn’t bother. 

G
Userlevel 4
Badge

Fortunately, I still have the S2 app on my desktop and Apple iPad, so I currently have normal control over my system and can still listen to music. But the Sonos management’s initial silence and subsequent stubborn resistance and ridiculous weeks and months long time-lines, convince me that Sonos does not care about their customers, but only about their long term revenue. People need to understand this could mean millions of dollars in income and bonuses to executives, so they can afford to ignore a few months of complaints from people who are essentially captive to using their speaker systems. The ethos may have been service agnostic, but money changes things and corporate directions, especially with publicly traded stock involved.

A
Userlevel 6
Badge +6

Fortunately, I still have the S2 app on my desktop and Apple iPad, so I currently have normal control over my system and can still listen to music. But the Sonos management’s initial silence and subsequent stubborn resistance and ridiculous weeks and months long time-lines, convince me that Sonos does not care about their customers, but only about their long term revenue. People need to understand this could mean millions of dollars in income and bonuses to executives, so they can afford to ignore a few months of complaints from people who are essentially captive to using their speaker systems. The ethos may have been service agnostic, but money changes things and corporate directions, especially with publicly traded stock involved.


Sonos f****ed up big time, and everyone was dealt a crappy app.  We all k lnow this.  But to say that So is don’tcare about their customers and only their revenue is a bit silly when their customers are their revenue.   Having existing customers come back to buy new kit is as important as findjng new customers.  There is no revenue without us.   The repeated notion of some kind of  evil corporate overlord that is out to get us is absurd.  As in all things in life — you pay your money and you make your choice.   if Sonos is not for you, well that is ok, we should all spend our money where it makes us happiest.  

G
Userlevel 4
Badge

I disagree. Sonos has a captive customer base where many have spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on their systems, which only work via the Sonos apps. They are not transferable or usable on any other system. Sonos controls whether their customer’s systems will work or not. After spending hundreds to thousands of dollars, it is doubtful many customers will be able to just walk away from that. And despite this latest disaster of a roll-out, Sonos also knows they have the best and most advanced Wi-fi speaker systems available. Two years ago in an attempt to move away from Sonos, I bought two Denon speakers, but their software app couldn’t even pair a set of stereo speakers.

Many people’s systems have been totally “bricked” by this update, and telling them to be patient for a few weeks or months, and not even offering a roll-back, is why I know Sonos does not care about their “captive” customers. It is obvious by their actions.

Let’s see how the customer base feels when Sonos starts charging $4.98 per month for customers to use their own speakers. Hmm that’s 5 million users, times 5 dollars per month, times twelve months per year. Ah yes $300,000,000 per year in additional revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for companies making money and increasing revenue, but this is not what I “signed up for” when I originally bought their speakers.

 

C
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

 

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

 

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

 

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

Ouch. This is brutal. 

A
Userlevel 6
Badge +6

I disagree. Sonos has a captive customer base where many have spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on their systems, which only work via the Sonos apps. They are not transferable or usable on any other system. Sonos controls whether their customer’s systems will work or not. After spending hundreds to thousands of dollars, it is doubtful many customers will be able to just walk away from that. And despite this latest disaster of a roll-out, Sonos also knows they have the best and most advanced Wi-fi speaker systems available. Two years ago in an attempt to move away from Sonos, I bought two Denon speakers, but their software app couldn’t even pair a set of stereo speakers.

Many people’s systems have been totally “bricked” by this update, and telling them to be patient for a few weeks or months, and not even offering a roll-back, is why I know Sonos does not care about their “captive” customers. It is obvious by their actions.

Let’s see how the customer base feels when Sonos starts charging $4.98 per month for customers to use their own speakers. Hmm that’s 5 million users, times 5 dollars per month, times twelve months per year. Ah yes $300,000,000 per year in additional revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for companies making money and increasing revenue, but this is not what I “signed up for” when I originally bought their speakers.

 

I disagree.  You are not captive unless you choose to be.  You are free to put the whole lot on Ebay and sell it, and as I pointed out elsewhere, you will get as much for it now as you did before the new app.  There are a lot of things you can buy that are more expensive than Sonos — people buy and sell cars all the time, as you are not captive by virtue of your purchase.  In fact there are plenty of people who have stated they are shedding their kit for something else.   You even indicated that you yourself were not captive as you bought a competitors product.  That you returned to Sonos was down to your free will and nothing else.  So the whole premise of your argument is wrong.  
It’s very tempting for people to think up weird and wonderful conspiracies because it’s much more interesting than the mundane reality.  Millions still think NASA didn’t put a man on the moon or that princess Diana wasn’t killed by a drunk chauffeur.   So why think that Sonos didn’t simply shove out a premature buggy app when some grand evil plan sounds so much more salacious?  
 

C
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

 

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

 

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

 

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

Sonos-ers 

We need to first assume incompetence BEFORE moving into malice. I’m sure nobody’s plan said “Screw over customers. Due May 9. 100% Complete.” 
 

I DO completely believe that the Sonos leaders don’t use Sonos products. They would not do this to themselves. 

S
Userlevel 1

THE NEW APP S U C K S!!!   Restore the previous version !!!!

G
Userlevel 4
Badge

I disagree. Sonos has a captive customer base where many have spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on their systems, which only work via the Sonos apps. They are not transferable or usable on any other system. Sonos controls whether their customer’s systems will work or not. After spending hundreds to thousands of dollars, it is doubtful many customers will be able to just walk away from that. And despite this latest disaster of a roll-out, Sonos also knows they have the best and most advanced Wi-fi speaker systems available. Two years ago in an attempt to move away from Sonos, I bought two Denon speakers, but their software app couldn’t even pair a set of stereo speakers.

Many people’s systems have been totally “bricked” by this update, and telling them to be patient for a few weeks or months, and not even offering a roll-back, is why I know Sonos does not care about their “captive” customers. It is obvious by their actions.

Let’s see how the customer base feels when Sonos starts charging $4.98 per month for customers to use their own speakers. Hmm that’s 5 million users, times 5 dollars per month, times twelve months per year. Ah yes $300,000,000 per year in additional revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for companies making money and increasing revenue, but this is not what I “signed up for” when I originally bought their speakers.

 

I disagree.  You are not captive unless you choose to be.  You are free to put the whole lot on Ebay and sell it, and as I pointed out elsewhere, you will get as much for it now as you did before the new app.  There are a lot of things you can buy that are more expensive than Sonos — people buy and sell cars all the time, as you are not captive by virtue of your purchase.  In fact there are plenty of people who have stated they are shedding their kit for something else.   You even indicated that you yourself were not captive as you bought a competitors product.  That you returned to Sonos was down to your free will and nothing else.  So the whole premise of your argument is wrong.  
It’s very tempting for people to think up weird and wonderful conspiracies because it’s much more interesting than the mundane reality.  Millions still think NASA didn’t put a man on the moon or that princess Diana wasn’t killed by a drunk chauffeur.   So why think that Sonos didn’t simply shove out a premature buggy app when some grand evil plan sounds so much more salacious?  
 

I disagree. Many other customers feel betrayed by Sonos and feel locked in to Sonos after spending thousands on their equipment. Perhaps your investment isn’t as substantial. Look, I generally don’t believe in conspiracies, and it’s not a conspiracy if it is an action taken by a single entity upon it’s customers. That’s like saying Enron was a conspiracy theory for over charging and ripping off other power companies. You are giving Sonos too much credit for an honest mistake. And I’m not assigning any malicious intent on Sonos. Just greed and the need to increase their revenue. But the way their management has responded makes it look malicious. So, looking at the facts, the only thing that I can conclude is that Sonos is moving towards a fee for service business plan. And for obvious reasons they are trying to keep it secret. The way they hyped their upgrade, and how secretive they were about what the changes were, and why they rushed an unprepared upgrade leads me to see that there is outside and inside pressure to quickly increase their revenue. If Sonos is moving towards a fee for service model, I just wish they would be honest about it and forewarn their customers.

C

They can't take away Spotify from us that would be a huge lawsuit. If I hsve Spotify there's no way I'm paying for another streaming music thing.  They clesrly made a new app to roll something out but I don't see how they could charge us to use the existing app. It wouldn't make sense.  I think arlo did something like this where you got free video storage and then they started charging for it, but they did it with new cameras. If you had the old camera they couldn't take it away from you. 

K

The underlying reason that something like this can happen to a large, mostly content customer base comes down to one word: monetization.

The internet has almost completely converted our entire economy into a “subscription” economy.

Noone wants to sell you a widget, then move on to find more people to sell more widgets to.

They key to “wall street success” for these companies is now sell the initial widget, then attach an ongoing revenue stream to the it. The “cloud” is IDEAL for this kind of exploitation. If you don’t make this happen, your business is considered a failure.

For example:You can buy a programmable mouse, with 16 programmable buttons from Razer which is a real productivity accelerator, but in order to use it, you have do download a 75Mb program, create an account on their site, start a cloud connected service when you start your computer, and log in to use it. A mouse… a MOUSE requires this. Arguably the simplest computer input device in existence.

I’ve lost count of the “smart devices” I’ve automated my home over the years that have simply bricked because of acqusition, end of life or “out of business” scenarios. I have box full of them.

Sonos has been marching in this direction for some time, and the recent app disaster has tipped their hand in the most public and embarassing way possible.

The point made clearly in the posts above this one is inescapable: Expect your Sonos system to come with a monthly cost in the near future.  At first this will be presented as “premium features”, like Sonos’ super-cool streaming channels (at the cost of eliminating the competition’s less costly free services), but make no mistake. There’s an inescapable cost coming down the pike in short order.  This will be presented under the guise of “in order to present the best user experience without all of these filthy free, undependable other ghetto services”, but it’s coming.  They may even try to scare their users by throwing up an internet security danger straw man. I wouldn’t be surprised.

For my part, I’m disengaging from any product that has an active, ongoing cloud tie-in whenever possible.  Any device that will simply stop working at the whim of management, or if the business fails or gets shut down due to acquisition is off the table for me.

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure.  Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat.  If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

 

 

 

jgatie

Wow.  Just . . . uhh . . . wow. 😕

S
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure.  Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat.  If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

 

When Sonos were starting out slimserver and squeezeboxes were the open alternative that you could diy. I know because I used it for a couple of years both in-home and across vpns, before buying into Sonos zone players.

If Arylic/Linkplay go out of business your up2Stream boxes will continue streaming until the online services update endpoints, APIs or protocols. Without anyone to keep the firmware for the embedded services or the app for app services up to date there will be no bug fixing, updating services and the boxes will still eventually end up bricks as they become incompatible with everything they used to work with.

The other scenario is what happens if Arylic get bought. When Google bought SageTV, they closed sourced everything and immediately stopped the sale of devices because they wanted the company IP for internal use in other Google products. While the community tried to battle on, the sale basically made the devices useless.

Unless you are building everything, hardware and software, yourself then everything has a single point of failure, it’s just a case of deciding what your acceptable risk level is and the cost/effort/personal time you want to put into reducing the risk.

G

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure.  Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat.  If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

 

When Sonos were starting out slimserver and squeezeboxes were the open alternative that you could diy. I know because I used it for a couple of years both in-home and across vpns, before buying into Sonos zone players.

If Arylic/Linkplay go out of business your up2Stream boxes will continue streaming until the online services update endpoints, APIs or protocols. Without anyone to keep the firmware for the embedded services or the app for app services up to date there will be no bug fixing, updating services and the boxes will still eventually end up bricks as they become incompatible with everything they used to work with.

The other scenario is what happens if Arylic get bought. When Google bought SageTV, they closed sourced everything and immediately stopped the sale of devices because they wanted the company IP for internal use in other Google products. While the community tried to battle on, the sale basically made the devices useless.

Unless you are building everything, hardware and software, yourself then everything has a single point of failure, it’s just a case of deciding what your acceptable risk level is and the cost/effort/personal time you want to put into reducing the risk.

Your individualistic solution of DIY ignores open source solutions or alternatives which are much more risk tolerant.  They do exist. 

🎵 First We Take Manhattan Then Berlin 🎵
S
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure.  Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat.  If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

 

When Sonos were starting out slimserver and squeezeboxes were the open alternative that you could diy. I know because I used it for a couple of years both in-home and across vpns, before buying into Sonos zone players.

….

Your individualistic solution of DIY ignores open source solutions or alternatives which are much more risk tolerant.  They do exist. 

I wasn’t ignoring them so much as hadn’t called them out specifically.

They sit on the risk/personal time investment assessment between the two extremes of full individual diy —> to pay someone else for everything and hope they stay aligned with what you want.

For what I want and need I am moving to a mix of open and closed source backend and controller components to exit the Sonos+Ikea smarthome integrated ecosystem I currently have.

I have been a user/contributor to open source both personally and at every company I’ve worked for over the past, checks calendar, 30 years 😳. It can be a very good option, especially if it aligns with what you want, has a healthy number of active developers and even better if you are able to contribute back in some way.

There isn’t a perfect solution that will never stop working, it’s just a case of figuring out what you need and selecting suitable parts that can be easily replaced when they no longer work the way you want.

A

I totally agree with your assessment. If you own music Sonos will charge a monthly fee for the version of the app that has the features we used to get for free. I want to own my music because you have no guarantee that the streaming service won’t remove the version I prefer.

J
Userlevel 3
Badge

….and let’s not forget about all the usage data of their install base (terms & conditions people). There’s a revenue stream in that. Very depressing.

Rhonny
Userlevel 6
Badge +10

….and let’s not forget about all the usage data of their install base (terms & conditions people). There’s a revenue stream in that. Very depressing.

Utter nonsense. Sonos does not sell its customer data. It would be in breach of its Ts & Cs if it did. You warn people of Terms and Conditions without actually reading what Sonos says about use of data. (It sells advertising on Sonos Radio by identifying interests and usage but does not sell its data... if that’s what you meant...)

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings