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I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand why any company would push an update as bad as this one.  It’s easy to blame the product & dev teams or lousy management but this team has been around and can’t be that dumb.  They knew what was coming and did it anyway.

So if you were running this company what would make you piss off millions of customers to this extent?  The only thing I can think of is a contractual obligation.

If they had signed a deal with some third party to share customer data and had to rearchitect the app since the old app probably didn’t log everything we did, and you had a deadline or the deal went away, then you would do something this bad to your customers.

My guess, totally speculative, is that they offered the customer data to some third party about a year earlier, it was for a lot of money (this could be really valuable in this new world of AI where every piece of training data can give one vendor a leg up) and they had to rebuild the app to make sure every click hit their servers so they could track and sell it.

Their dev team would have said “no problem”, we can do this easily in half that time.  Then reality set in and everything takes 10x longer than expected and they were up against the wall.  The deadline was probably June 30, explaining the mid May release.

This would also explain how laggy new new app is, everything is going to the cloud now, not staying local to your wifi network.  The old app, built 10 years ago, would have been optimized for local performance since logging everything to the cloud wasn’t valuable back then.

 

They knew this app was this bad - they have the resources to test and gather feedback

The launched anyway - months before it was even close to being ready for a beta test

They aren’t idiots - testing new software isn’t rocket science, they would have access to the tools they needed to understand the performance of what they had

There had to be another reason this can’t just be incompetence.

 

 

Yes, and the moon landings were faked and Elvis lives.

I think your brain needs a break from  being racked.

As you say yourself, your assumption is totally speculative and there is not a single fact that to support this hypothesis.You could also say that some martians had taken control of the brain of the CEO and are conducting experiments on how to piss off humans.

Nevertheless, I totally agree with you that Sonos has not shared a credible explanation on the process that led to the release of such a pathetic application in May. I think they knew it was buggy and a big regression in features but they probably underestimated customer dissatisfaction and overestimated they ability to correct this. So, sadly, I think yes, it is mainly incompetence and blindness.

But also you point something very important and interesting : “what would make you piss off millions of customers to this extent?”

And for that one, I’m like you : I don’t understand. They said 2 weeks ago they wouldn’t release the old app because the backend and firmware has evolved and it’s not so stable now. Well, third party apps work, I have the old app on an old ipad that works. So that’s simply a lie. they just don’t want to lose time releasing the old app. There may be some work to do, but bringing up something that worked in the recent past is a matter of days (maybe weeks if you worked dirty), while bringing something new is a matter of months.

My only explanation for that is that they are too tech-oriented, over-confident and arrogant instead of being  customer-oriented. And I also classify this as incompetence from top management.

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