I know that this is still not the basis for a class action lawsuit; but by now it should at least get any remaining Sonos apologists to stop adding insult to injury.

In a world that has gone crazy, music is a saving grace. Denying that grace is nothing short of criminal, if not in law, at least by some moral code.

Sorry, they call it Sonos Services on the status page, but if that’s down or laggy, then if you rely on streaming and go through the Sonos App… tough luck. You’ll get a rather sorry looking empty screen as per @sigh … And it was down today for much longer than the incident history would suggest. 

But you ask a great question. If Sonos haven’t invested in infrastructure around the world, then I presume the current app is even worse in some regions. 

It seems like they do have/had infrastructure issues with the new system in at least one region. But overall it seems like Sonos services crashes fairly often, everywhere. 
 

Apart from class action, which doesn’t yet seem to have caught on, I suspect if several thousand angry SONOS customers contacted the Federal Trade Commission, it might lead to a formal inquiry or at least some useful press. The FTC is charged with investigating, among other things, “bad business practices”, a phrase that arguably applies to a company whose unilateral action disrupted the well-functioning music system of countless customers. Seems to me that Patrick Spence has already confessed to what they did. Are they legally liable? That’s what the FTC is in the business of sorting out. Let them do their job. It’s easy to send in a report. See https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq. (U.S. residents only, but other countries undoubtedly have similar govenment agencies.)

I believe it’ll be more likely a shareholder lawsuit that breaks through.  Their silly T&Cs keep evolving but pretty well covers their arse for crap-app based suits.  FTC is a good one.  In the states, let the BBB know your thoughts on a company that fired most of their once great in-country support teams (leading to hours of on-hold or off-line chat support and script-reading contracted CS agents), + lied to consumers with the new S2 roll-out, and +++. 

My friends have also contacted their state’s attorney general, consumer reports, consumer affairs, and more. 

Keep up the pressure till the board and c-suite leave or fix this train-wreck. 

Getting on for four months now and the class action has moved as far as an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping. So many big words being quoted from Google searches, and reports from discussions with friends who are always legal experts.

(By the way, the Federal Trade Commission? Are they the ones that blockaded Naboo?)

Well that didn’t take long at all

After a disappointingly uneventful upgrade of firmware and app with some basic tests, tonight has been far more fun filled and productive. A quick summary so far

While not using the app (but it was open) or having music playing

• The iPad controller app corrupted it’s user data requiring a re-install. After corruption it showed the black Sonos splash screen, didn’t even attempt to make network requests then back grounded itself when launching it.
• One speaker stopped advertising Airplay, but would still play and group via the desktop app and web app. Tablet app was broken so I couldn’t try with that.

Playing back music, I have repeatable on demand issues

• If a group contains 4 or more devices, there is a delay of up to 12 seconds or music dropping in and out during the first 12 seconds on all devices except the group controller when starting music, changing tracks. By devices that includes a sub and/or stereo pairs, not 4 sonos rooms. Have a suspicion about what’s causing this, just need to work out how to confirm it.
• Changing group members in the app gets slow after the above and playing music. Track progress starts getting jumpy, cloud api calls take longer.

On the bright side, volume controls have been real time responsive, even when music playback and grouping isn’t 

Something to keep in mind for the “it’s your network crowd”

• Before the update I had 11 or 12 sonos devices which could play in a single group without any issues or delays in the controller or music playback.
• I regularly grouped 5-6 devices without issues (stereo pair + sub, with 2-3 other speakers)
• The playback and slow response issues occur using wifi or sonosnet.
• For giggles tonight I had 24/192 5Mbps stream coming across wifi to an AVR, which was sending back out over wifi to 3 wifi connected players + a lan connected avr with an IP connected sub that stayed in sync and responded immediately.
• I followed that up with the same 24/192 stream played from the qobuz app on the iPad over airplay to 5 yamaha devices & 5 (1 was still awol for airplay) sonos speakers
• With both the above everything else using wifi continued to work as usual.

Still have more things to test  and confirm

Something noticeable is the Sonos app is the least smooth and appears slowest out of the 3 other music apps I use for browsing qobuz. Not good, especially when the others show more details

I’m waiting for the “it’s your network” crowd to ask “Have you enclosed your house in Faraday cage?”

Per @slworona , there is now less of that crowd here now. And believe me, I have seen them at full strength and in loud voice in 2020. 

I think that the “it’s your network” crowd is becoming tired of being slammed by people with “perfect” networks and we are simply no longer offering help. What we don’t understand is why so many people are reporting trouble with the same hardware and software that we are using -- when we aren’t having the same sort of trouble. What could be different between our systems?

Request latency can be a weird thing and not occur where you expect. I worked on a service hosted in the Netherlands, with data connections into the Amsterdam backbone exchange. In general our UK clients had better responses and a faster application than our Dutch ones, due to the in country network ISPs connected end users to.

I’d expect Sonos to at least have US, EMEA and APAC infrastructure, where exactly would depend on their service provider. AWS and other cloud providers have solved the low latency global database replication difficulty, just need to flash the cash at them, so they could have fully distributed data stores without much difficulty

For companies like Netflix who have geographic restrictions, it’s much easier for them to have independent data installations per region, so they didn’t initially design for global redundancy. For truly global operation it is usually the data stores providing the source of truth that are the difficulty. AWS for example, still have some things centrally in US-East that the regional sites use as the source of truth.

We know they work with Akamai, so taking a reasonable guess at the Sonos infrastructure, they could have edge processing and caching within Akamai for responsiveness for the time sensitive calls backed by a much smaller number of datacentres or even centrally.

For most companies it’s usually a risk assessment vs cost decision, with limited input from performance. I still get far too many blank look responses when I ask about the expected request response times for ola/sla that things need to be designed and built against.

First, I don’t think that anyone like Ken Griffiths gets slammed, at the times when all he does is offer help, which he continues to do with admirable tenacity and goodwill. I haven’t seen this slamming happen to you either. And that is down to the language you use.

The second point is the more important thing though. The question however needs to be rephrased to ask - Why are our systems special - because given all that was said in the Spence mea culpa, your systems would seem to be the outliers.

And why hasn’t Sonos offered what seems to work for such outliers to the user base at large, instead of doing all that Spence has put out in the investor call a week or so ago?

I get the first part; I also understand the Sonos rationale for not offering Alexa integration in India, and they have addressed the consequence of that by having fine print on their Indian distribution marketing collateral by saying that voice control via Alexa is not available in India.

But how will they address the present issue?! Also, I suspect that the latency issues for the new app are notably worse in APAC just now, from admittedly anecdotal reporting. 

With regard to the network issue question. There seems to be little doubt that people running with similar topographies are experiencing the full gamut of problems, from 'running perfectly' to 'totally shot'. However, as has been pointed out by the specialist appraisals, there is far more to consider than just the local environment. Not least:

* Very few installs will be identical, similar but not identical

* Use cases will differ wildly, local vs. stream, grouping habits, favourite list content, local album art resolution ect. ect.

* WIthout extensive knowledge of the Sonos cloud back end processes it is impossible to say setup is identical as there is far more than the user end app and hardware to consider

* As has been mentioned, cloud implementations are complex and can demonstrate differing behaviours across use cases regardless of user side install, region ect.

Obviously networks play a major role in our systems and review and some tweaking does no harm but 'should' not be necessary to make our systems work - outside of the more technical config issues maybe (like those I fell foul of for example ).

I would posit that if you can successfully stream audio or video to a device on the network then this would dwarf the traffic volume that Sonos should need for its functional requirement (outside of a stream itself) and the network should be up to the job...

The latest insult with the app was yesterday when for extended periods the app refused to load. Everything was greyed out. Nothing could be selected, or changed, speakers were still playing music. Thinking it was the iPhone checked the iPad controller: same thing.

As my dinner guests were saying incredulously “This has been going on for months and it still has not been fixed? How can this be?” Indeed, how?

Sometime later it all came back but bad functionality is one thing, no functionality at all is quite another.

And before anyone asks, my WiFi system was fully functioning.

@User117655 But why is it that Sonos apologists for some years now seem to be the only ones here with little trouble with the new app?!

While I have long since dumped all my Sonos hardware and happier for it, regrettably my Dad is still using his and still has no access to internet radio abroad, which is the only thing he uses it for. Before I go around and bin all his kit as well and replace it with something that works, is Sonos looking for a workaround to the international internet radio access issue, perhaps implementing Airable or allowing users to add custom URL’s again via TuneIn?

Hello,
this may help you
Sorry, the guide I have is in French:
Here is the translation :

In the sonos App guide
Add a custom radio station
Add a radio station to your favourites that doesn't appear in the radio guide. You need to know
the transmission URL, and the station must use the MP3, HLS/AAC or WMA streaming format.
1. From the Manage menu, select Add a radio station.
2. Type the transmission URL associated with the radio station you want to add (for example: 
http://shoutcast.com/sbin/shoutcast-playlists.pls?rn=8107&file=filename.pls).
3. Enter the name of the radio station in the Station name field.
The new station appears in your My Radio Stations list.
Modifying a personalised radio station
1. Select Radio by TuneIn and choose My radio stations.
2. Select
next to the radio station you want to edit, then select Edit radio station.
3. Change the transmission URL or the station name

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Thank you for the above. I have added the station but can’t find it. Can you advise how to find the below please as I can’t find ‘My radio stations’?

Select Radio by TuneIn and choose My radio stations. 

I have given up. Locked down my devices so no updates with apps or firmware until I see a definite fix. NOT believing any app update descriptions as accurate. One android phone has early May update. Other devices still have pre-May 2024 S2 app. I will not be tricked into updating firmware, thereby disabling my hardware, and forcing me to update app which causes may cause me to endure less control and basic listening functions  - with the ever increasing problems. Sure, I am missing a few basic functions that we all paid for and loved, but I can play most music, control volume, and speakers remain connected. Unsubscribed from SONOS emails false advertising and lies about the app. I endured a few problems with the 2020(?) S2 update. Mostly it was lies attempting to trick us into buying all new hardware. They finally explained most hardware was S2 compatible, by putting out a nifty chart. But I never forgot their blatant attempt at deception. The sheer stupidity of putting out an app and then telling all your customers they need speaker put me on forever not trusting SONOS. It is mind-boggling that they do not put the most simple, how to info about app functions and setup on the website. Trial and error, plus digging in the community forums for basic info, is usually the only way to get something solved. SONOS relies on volunteers to ‘crowdsolve’ their lazy, inept product support.

Indeed. I was one till I was obsoleted in 2020 by S2.

SONOS seems to have advanced from treating their users as involuntary beta-testers to treating them as involuntary crash-test dummies.

Well this is new (for me) and not ideal, speakers playing -> left app -> back to app (Android) and…

Until close and re-open... ‍♂️

Well this is new (for me) and not ideal, speakers playing -> left app -> back to app (Android) and…

Until close and re-open... ‍♂️

We used to be able to sit in our Living Room and while watching a movie or show on the TV, would hear some background music, my wife would ask me what that was, and I would be searching for it on my iPad (local music library) and within no time at all, start playing that music on the Sunroom Play:3, which is right next to the Living Room. She would always be amazed how fast I could queue up and play a piece of music that we just listened to. I just can’t seem to do that anymore. 

it takes me around 30 seconds to search, find and play a ‘random’ track (as attached) - it’s a lot quicker if I have it saved already to the App Home Screen and playback starts faster if it’s held in my local library. In this instance I just search for your user-name and selected a track to play. I’m not sure it was really any quicker when using the previous S2 App? Sadly I can’t compare things, until the S2 App returns (er.. perhaps?) That’s if the rumours started by The Verge are true, or not?