Who will buy the new Sonos headphones?

Let’s hope they work better than the new app!

Imagine: “We plan to support the right-side speaker in a firmware update scheduled for early September. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy your new headphones.”

 Is it though? Aside from the Arc integration, they dont offer anything my Sony headphones dont give me. I was hoping the Ace’s would work with the rest of my Sonos speakers the same way any other Sonos item would. Big disappointment.

I will not be buying the new headphones as I do not need a ‘my head’ zone.  Why make customers upset when you don’t have to?  I guess it was intentional as they new things were missing and new app was buggy.  They meant to upset us.  I’m not referring to the product team or support team.  I believe they did not want to release it.  But someone did and they knew we would be upset.

Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

YES!

Everything I have seen in this new app release can easily be explained by neglect, ignorance, or incompetence.

Not sure I agree.  Nobody was neglectful or ignorant of the flaws in the app.  It went through a full Beta test and some of the testers have stated they reported the obvious flaws.  But it was released anyway.  Which means there was another reason to release it besides customer satisfaction.  That reason is obviously the expected end of fiscal year sales figures spearheaded by the new headphones, which require the new app to operate.

Now whether that reason is worthy of risking the backlash against the app remains to be seen.  However, there have been less than 1000 new registrants on this site since the app release.  Even if 10 times that amount are unhappy with the app and just dump Sonos or complain about it somewhere else, that’s a fraction of a fraction of Sonos’ millions of users.  It may just be that the vast majority see something different, with a few teething pains, and go on their way.  I know that’s how I saw it and how millions have seen the app overhauls in the past. 

So if Sonos meets their sales enough to satisfy investors, and weathers the storm of the extremely vocal, but relatively small number of screaming banshees and their socks on here and Reddit, then I certainly can’t call them incompetent.  

The new firmware/app could easily have been released as “S3”, with a warning that S2 was EOL.  Headphone release would proceed as scheduled. Their customer support staff would have been less overwhelmed.  The development staff would have had more breathing room.  There would have been no need to “weather the storm”.  Sales certainly wouldn’t have been any worse.

Sounds easy, but it’s not.  Forking an application is a freaking horror show, even for a few months.  Besides that, giving an option to stay on the old app and not buy the headphones until the new app was up to snuff would most certainly put a damper on the June 30th end of fiscal year sales, which is what this is all about.  

Since the new app is designed from ground up, I believe it is a total separate code base.  I’m sure the last package still exists and can easily be release to the App Store as a separate SHELP app.  And I sure those having trouble will not be spending $450 on headphone with an app that still does not work.

Yep, start with the zero head phone users and make sure they can buy new headphones with a bad app.  That number will grow from 0 to a larger number eventually over passing the number of customer pissed off.