The new Sonos S2 App Sucks

I’m sure it has changed and is cloud based - maybe Sonos are going to integrate AI and take things to another level eventually, but we’ll have to wait and see. Sonos has always been a forward thinking company and I’m sure there is method in the madness of rebuilding the App from the ground up. It’s just going to take time and I will perhaps judge things in 18 months time, or so, from now and just wait patiently.

New application that was intuitive and easy to use sucks so so so bad.  Sonos should roll it back to the previous version, fire the developers and UX team and get back to simple intuitive interface that please the customers that buy these very expensive speakers.  Keep the crappy app and many will abandon Sonus just like BudLight got abandoned.  Be smart. Test with your customer, not developers who think complicated is cool - it isn’t cool at all. 

I’m sorry, Ken, but that’s a bit ludicrous. We’re talking about a mass market consumer product. It’s supposed to be easy to use; and that has been its biggest selling point since inception. It may be laudable that Sonos is going to the trouble to ‘rebuild from the ground up,’ and the end result might be just marvelous a year from now; but customers did not sign up to become guinea pigs for a year or more while Sonos ‘rebuilds.’

The current app is clearly a work in progress. It should have been offered on a voluntary basis to the tech nerds among us who are willing to participate in an ongoing experiment. Instead, it has been force-fed to people like me who just want to play music without a lot of fuss, and without having to watch and learn how the new and improved sausage is being made.

Every time I download a new ‘update,’ new bugs appear. I still have none of the most important and basic functions I relied on and justifiably took for granted before the recent shakeup. Features reappear and disappear without rhyme or reason. Every time I open my app, I wonder (with some trepidation) what next.

There is really only one satisfactory solution at present. Sonos must fall on its sword; admit it released this new app prematurely; apologize to concerned users instead of playing ‘blame the victim’; and provide an easy way to revert to the old controller app. It worked pretty much flawlessly, without a lot of effort on our part. There can be no dispute: the current app does not work.

At that point, Sonos can take all the time it wants to do all the tinkering and ‘rebuilding from the ground up’ it’s little old heart desires. But while that is an ongoing effort, Sonos owners need to get our music back, with our lost playlists restored; simple playlist and queue editing with ability to save edited queues and playlists; smooth operation of volume controls; speaker grouping that works every time, not sporadically; and so on.

I keep reading a variety of explanations why these things don’t work now… all boiling down to ‘it’s something in your own setup.’ That’s nonsense. All of these things were working just fine before just one thing changed: the new app invaded our devices. It is not something in my home network that suddenly went wrong the same day the new app replaced the pre-existing one.

Listening to music using my Sonos speakers should be a simple, reliable, enjoyable experience… not a year of frustration and repeated disappointment. Leaving Sonos owners with no option but to ‘be patient’ is quite simply unacceptable.

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Super frustrated.  My surrounds (Ones) and sub (Gen 3) will no longer connect to the Arc after using the new app. 

Tried factory resets.  The Arc goes fine.

Get all the way to the end of the Surrounds setup and then the surrounds show as ‘not available’.

When adding the sub, I get all the way to the end and then only the Sub shows up, the Arc and the Surround are no longer there.

Since I’ve done this about 3x now (maybe more), I’m pretty frustrated.

If you ‘perhaps’ have the Ones stereo paired, then you need to unpair them first to add them as HT surrounds - I’m not sure if that’s your issue here, but mention it, in case.

@Ken_Griffiths : I’ve contacted Sonos support. The best I’ve gotten from that is ‘be patient.’ I think we’ve previously confirmed those playlists you have displayed were either ‘canned’ lists from an outside service or lists you created on those services. My playlists were all created on the Sonos app by saving albums or tracks in a queue and then saving that queue as a playlist. Those playlists do not display at all in the app and display only intermittently using the web app. If I try to open and play a Sonos playlist in the web app, I’ve gotten ‘internal server error.’

I’ve asked Sonos to explain that. The response was ‘can’t explain it’ and ‘we’re still working on this.’ In other words, ‘be patient.’ 

The fact remains that it’s great that the app works for you; but for thousands, or tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of us, it is not working. Maybe if each of us had sufficient technical skills and time to rectify whatever is preventing the app from working, we could overcome our difficulties.

But we should not be expected to do that. I do not have to be an auto mechanic to drive my car. I do not have to be an electrician and troubleshoot my wall oven and electrical service panel every time I want to bake a pie. I should not have to spend hours troubleshooting my music system in order to find and play music I saved in a library of Sonos playlists, or wait months for a team of coders to figure out how to restore my access to my music. 

With all due respect, I’ve read quite a few posts you’ve submitted here with all sorts of technical details that mean nothing to me. I’m sure they may be helpful to those in the know, but I will readily admit I’m not one of those in the know. I’m just a dummy who wants to access and play my music with the least frustration and difficulty. That’s what I signed up for when I bought a few grand worth of Sonos speakers. That’s what I had until the recent controller app fiasco.

As I said, all of this worked seamlessly right up to the moment the new controller app replaced the existing one on my devices. I did not have to plumb the inner depths of my home network to make things work; and I should not be required to do that now. There is a solution staring us in the face: allow us to revert to the controller that we know will work, until such time as it is reasonably certain the new one will work.

That’s not rocket science. It’s just common sense. I still have not heard a good reason why Sonos steadfastly refuses to offer that common sense option.

What you mention makes perfect sense @chambolle and I do agree with your last post here, the App should work ‘out the box’ and I don’t know why it doesn’t for some, as I did nothing special when I upgraded from S2 - things did/do always work here.

The Sonos playlists you mention though are an issue and the playlists I have are indeed ‘canned’ ones from the Amazon Music Service, or ones I created in that service myself - the Sonos playlists do need to be resolved. I will agree with anything that’s correct, so don’t think I’m here to defend everything Sonos have done - but it is the case the App and my local NAS library have always worked here. I can play my existing music sources, whether that be from my library, Amazon Music or the other sources you can perhaps see in my earlier uploaded attachments.

I accept the App still has some features that need to be added to it aswell.

Two things I need to be able to do quickly.   1) pick the speaker I want (or set of speakers) and 2) choose the music to play.   Neither one of these is simple or intuitive.  It’s like it’s a disjointed process.  You go set music and then go somewhere else to figure out the speakers to use, or vice versa.   It makes me angry every time I open the app.  And that’s not counting the bugs, like every time I go from one house to the other, it makes me rejoin the system and at my main house it thinks each amp is a separate Sonos system and I have to join the amp and hope it’s the right one.   It’s just awful.