Sonos is becoming more stupid by the day

I hope that your daughter is ok…

Tell me one company where a CEO complaint is handled by the CEO. I’ll wait.

Yes, I’m feeling sorry for the daughter too.

The simple steps to downgrade S2 to S1 are outlined HERE. Just sign her controller device out of the Sonos account to stop a reoccurrence. It will not affect her own playback etc. to the speakers

I'd agree it is too easy to "upgrade", there really should be a Master User for certain functions, this being one of them!.

When I set my daughters Play One up I made her a new account and put that One on S2 to avoid her accidentally ruining our whole house S1 system.

The Spotify App is really good, you can basically run Sonos without the risk of altering any system settings.

Spotify and Alexa are our preferred way of using Sonos.

As @Ken_Griffiths points out, in order to play music, they don’t need to be logged in to the controller, but to update to S2, they do. 

I agree, completely agree with your assessment. I’m an experienced former electronics engineer and these days I’m a software developer and sometimes dabble in microcontroller development so I’m pretty aware of the kinds of things that influence technical decisions.

I too did the “upgrade” last year, read about that here.

The fact that an upgrade can render a system silent is poor design, if the system has some older components that might be negatively impacted by the upgrade then warn the user.

The upgrade workflow is poor, the steps it goes through are not intuitive, the opportunities to help the user avoid a mistake are not being exploited. This kind of short sighted software development mindset is why so many things just don’t work well these days, require endless hours of nurturing by the owners, simple devices suffer and so to do cars like Tesla and if the US ever embarks on the development of a new air traffic control system God help us all.

Software is inherently potentially very complex, scenarios arise that the designers failed to anticipate, a reboot is the new way to “fix” a system, it’s terrible, rush, rush, rush no matter what doesn’t work.

Imagine a 90 year old lady, living alone, who’s husband passed away a year ago, trying to deal with this! She likely just wants to listen to the music, then gets prompted with intrusive “update” BS and then her system goes dead, what is she to do?

We don’t pay money and buy technology only for us to have to do our own product support.

These guys could learn some lessons from operating systems designers too. There could be a much better way to manage all these components, a way that makes it always reliable to do updates and so on, a way to manage the user’s setup holistically.

Imagine a 90 year old lady, living alone, who’s husband (a former electronics engineer) passed away a year ago, turns on her television/radio/central heating/oven etc and the device goes dead, what does she do?

I think we do pay money and buy technology, and we do our own product support with the help of others.

The 90 year old lady would call on a family/friend to assist getting the device repaired?

Well there are people for whom a messed up setup like that is a big deal, no family or friends around or available. Besides we can all envisage how the reality of this would pan out on a phone call, back and forth

“no don’t press that, are you running v 1.2.17x? yes start the app again - no not the phone app - and when it asks “do you want to reset” press the info button - no not the ‘i’ button the device itself, I meant on the dialog...pardon? OK well a dialog is a small window that comes up and  you must do something with it - then scroll down to WiFi modes supported, in that list you should see one that...”

and so on and so forth.

Systems that we pay for should work as advertised, today in the “modern” world of backward software, they often do not. How often are we told to reboot the TV or the router, now even our car? Rebooting has become a way of overcoming bugs, that’s why we’re told to do it.

The designer and/or developers have failed to do their job, the system can get into unanticipated states and there’s no way - using that system - to get into a desired state so we reboot!

I used to develop software for stock exchanges, the idea of “rebooting” critical systems is not an option, it is an absolute last resort and very rarely done, sometimes not for years at a time. My wife reboots one of the TVs every few days, she has to because Android is trash and regularly gets messed up or falls victim to “apps” that have messed up.

Routinely needing to reboot any computer system that’s operational, in use for some purpose, is a hallmark of poor quality, the fact that more and more naive people are regarding it as normal is a huge problem.

We’re heading backwards when it comes to software quality and there are several reasons for this, but I won’t go into them here, when will Tesla be making their first ambulance or fire truck Elon?

Gotta love that video example too, I mean there’s a message displayed in his car that says:

Systems are powering up

Press brake when this message clears

(Try following the instructions in a message that is no longer being displayed)

It’s literally like something out of a Kafka novel.

A warning to anyone thinking about spending thousands of dollars on this stuff, you never really own it, they can shut it down in a heartbeat, intentionally or otherwise. They've done it to me at least a half dozen times, with no warning whatsoever. Tomorrow I'll pull my old 1970's Pioneer Spec stuff out of storage and set it back up. It was working just fine 7 years ago when I replaced it with this crap.

A part of your post here does seem like a rather libellous statement. Maybe you should go onto reveal the evidence you hold in support of your very public comment …and explain what you mean by ‘intentionally, or otherwise.’ because just that remark in itself, seems to infer you actually do not have the evidence on which to base your original comment and are simply making an unfounded ‘guess’ at what may have happened just to you …and no-one else.

Sonos releases updates that prevent you from controlling your system until you go through the update process.  This often effectively shuts down your system with little or no warning. Since this is a feature of their software, one would presume that it is intentional. I included “or otherwise” to cover the possibility that they are too stupid to realize that their software has this feature.

Ironically, they spam me constantly with e-mails trying to get me to purchase more of their products, when it’s their failure to e-mail me a warning that a mandatory update is looming that assures that I never will again.

Just simply switch off both speaker/device firmware and Sonos App software updates, if that’s your choosing. You can then carry on with the version you have without ever being troubled again.
 

The in-App and email marketing messages you refer to can be switched off in your online Sonos account and disable ‘allow popup messages’ in the Sonos App via Settings/App Preferences and that will resolve all the issues you’ve mentioned.