I’m a Sonos user since 2012. And this update disappointed me faster than I thought would be possible.  I just sat next to my dad who said “sonos … redesign … huh”. My immediate response was “please, god, no”. This should tell you everything what my state of mind was after S2. I wish my response would have been “oh yeah, they are gonna fix the S2 issues” but no …

The S2 app already left me in a state where I kept triggering stuff on the wrong group multiple times a week (and typically I would kill a running Spotify audio book for my child and there was no way to tell it to back to the audiobook but having to god damn re-invoke the search, navigate the exact chapter and play it again).

I don’t know how to say this, but the whole group handling had me - a 12 year sonos user - have to watch 2 videos to figure out what the hell was going on and now that I understand that the groups/speaker selection feature is hidden behind “<whateveryounamedyoursystem>” dropdown is completely undiscoverable.

And then it was still clunky to understand which part of the UI you’re getting when tapping somewhere. Did I activate the group/player as the current thing? Do I get to go to search now? What’s going on?

It took as almost 15 minutes as two experienced Sonos users and both our reactions after this was: there’s no way our kids and partners are going to respond positively to this.

And alarms are gone? Really? I’m not sure what’s going on at Sonos, but man, pulling the rug this way is really bad. You couldn’t have waited for feature parity?

This is the move I’m expecting when buying cheap stuff where they’re desperate to get something out the door, but this isn’t what I’m expecting from a system that has been refined over MORE THAN A DECADE and has already had a bad rep after the last UI redesign.

S1 was easy, had straight forward mechanis and everyone could use it.

S2 was already clunky and slow and … NOW THIS.

I wish I would trust in you listening to users, but apparently … well … maybe you did and everyone was telling you “we’d like it to be worse”. I wishi I could have the feeling that providing constructive feedback would help, but that trust is completely lost now. I don’t think I can provide anything else than venting. Feel free to convince me of the opposite.