<soapbox>
Sonos makes great hardware. I’ve always liked it better. Especially brilliant innovations like Move with its inductive charging ring and beautiful industrial design.
But Sonos software has been so bad lately that I’m considering abandoning thousands of dollars in Sonos hardware to switch to the Apple ecosystem. Say what you will about AirPlay (it often stutters when it gets started, for example, while the Sonos firmware just seems to work almost every time), but it works pretty seamlessly across the apps.
The problems with Sonos software are many, but the most egregious of them is that the integration between Sonos and Spotify (and Apple) feels and functions like the terrible hack that it is. There has to be a way for these two companies to get together to actually solve this problem because neither app works like magic. They are sort of cobbled together in a way that doesn’t work smoothly in either app. When it does work after fiddling with *both apps*, there’s still this miserable lag time with the volume slider. That’s just sad in 2024.
The investment from Sonos needs to be made not in new features but in making the existing features work: smoothly, transparently and like magic, without having users going to forums like this one for answers. Great products need little in support and lately Sonos has been heading really hard in the wrong direction. Fix it and I’ll stay. Continue to ignore this and I’ll be leaving simply forever because I don’t want to spend hours trying to figure out the latest Sonos / Spotify / Apple audio integration clusterf*ck.
It should not take hours to figure out that playing your own .m4a files is not a reasonable thing to try on Spotify or Sonos, but can be achieved (within a reasonable amount of pain) only on Apple Music or playing directly in the iOS player from a cloud filesystem. Terrible. Do people at Sonos use their own software?
Okay.
So that I’m not just complaining and to make a specific request that Sonos can address: Sonos should spend a full 9 month release cycle doing nothing but getting to the bottom of bugs, improving integration with Spotify, stripping out confusion and generally making the existing features magic rather than tragic. Apple did this in a version of macOS years ago and it was massively popular with users.
Do that. And do it now.
For the future: get together with Spotify and Apple and create a unified playlist specification so we don’t have 3 different types of playlists that duplicate 99% of the same functionality but don’t interoperate. If this can’t be done, figure out the magic to convert playlists transparently so we don’t have to know there are different kinds of playlists or how they work or where they are stored. I can’t believe it's 2024 and we still have more than three completely different and incompatible playlist formats that can’t be interchanged easily. Make it unified.
</soapbox>
Best,
Jon