Your feedback on the new Sonos App

I think it might be worth checking if you have a Windows store auto update flag too if your PC is updating?

I am actually concerned that they will fold as a company after this. Hopefully the headphones will do okay but I’d be doubtful. At the very least it’s going to take quite some time to get a return on all the work/money they put into it. It was a complete disaster of an app update. If it was needed for the headphones the headphone release should have been put off a quarter. The CEO should be gone. The stock price has been on the decline for quite some time. If I was a shareholder I would be rope-able.

The bedroom One I used to setup my spare room won’t be getting replaced. 

You are absolutely correct about this. Its all for the release of their headphones. Those are the only things that might work! Not much else does at this point.

I’ve read hundreds of posts on the new app mentioning just about everything being broken.  However, the one thing that seems to always work on any platform all the time is the add to buy the new headphones.  My homepage is all grey, nothing works, but that add for the new headphones is bright and clear and works every time.  Enough said about their priorities in this app rollout.  

Ok I’m sorry but I lol’d at your post. You can turn off the in app notifications. Go you your Sonos.com account then profile>edit, scroll to the bottom and turn off app notifications. 
You can take it a step further and block the Sonos data collection domain: 

msmetrics.ws.sonos.com

The new app is just fundamentally bad. Horrible. Unintuitive. A worse experience. A poor experience. I use my system less now. Your customers know it, the world knows it. 2024 Sonos software just plain sucks.

Not enough returns just yet! Keep going Sonos!

My feedback: the new app should never have been signed off and released in its current form.

If I’d wanted to participate in the beta program, I’d have signed up for it.

You can listen to all the music you don’t own and Sonos will sell you again and again to 3rd party metrics warehouse so you are the product that keeps the company afloat! Thanks Mr Spence, disengaged since 2020 when S2 was handed to us. (Check his X feed). 

Stop with the silly FUD.  Sonos’ privacy policy specifically states they do not and will not sell your data.  Period. 

https://www.sonos.com/en-us/legal/privacy#:~:text=Sonos%20does%20not%20and%20will%20not%20sell%20personal%20information%20about%20our%20customers.

We do not and will not sell your personal data to third parties.

Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers. 

Who wrote this official statement? Your PR and Lawyer? Putting what was working before as “new feature” and “update” is just pure crap. What’s next? We’ll have a button with $500,000 price tag as we hover over it. We’ll have to pay if we want that button? You said you read all our comments but apparently you haven’t comprehend what your users are telling you. You said you’re listening but I suppose you’re tone deaf at this point.

Sonos apologists starting to rear their heads... They specifically promised an amazing new app too...

Promising an amazing app isn’t regulated by a government agency that has the power to fine some of the biggest tech companies in the world to the tune of 100’s of millions to billions of dollars.  Privacy statements are.  So again, knock it off with the FUD. 

Having put out an app that was clearly a mistake (and not ready), and realising this based on the strength of feeling, and rolling out weekly updates to implement fixes, what would you like the team at Sonos to do or say that they are not already doing? 

I'm not too fussed personally but from what I've seen here and elsewhere, most people suffering issues with the app would like Sonos to rollback the S2 app and release the work-in-progress version as a separate app until it's fully functional. No idea if that's possible but that's what many users want.

@RJSUK 

Can’t argue with that.

It’s painfully obvious what is at work here.  Sonos needed to get the headphones out to the public to satisfy fiscal end of year sales promises.  So it rushed out the app which supports the headphones.  They were willing to take the hit on a half-baked app in order to meet that deadline.  There’s not one chance they are going to take the PR hit on the half-baked app, a subsequent PR hit due to the “mea culpa” rolling back to a previous app, and lose the headphones sales.  People should just stop. 

Besides, there hasn’t been one app overhaul yet that wasn’t greeted with the bleat of “Give us back the old app!”   Fast forward to the next overhaul and that hated new version becomes the beloved old version everyone is clamoring for, with hardly any improvements.  Sonos knows the hue and cry is mainly due to lack of familiarity, because they’ve been through this before (none of which excuses the lack of existing features the app went out with.  There’s no excuse for that). 

Don’t forget 7th May was also Sonos’ latest financial results day where the commentary of the results championed the release of a brand new app that day. From an investor confidence point of view, they could ill-afford to miss 7th May for app release, ready or not. [My surmising.]

Of course they're not going to have a PR disaster by admitting they were wrong but the issue with the new app is not unfamiliarity, it's the fact that it's caused so many problems.

I just want to add my new speakers. Then I’ll use another app to play music. The previous versions of the new app got me to entering pin for the SL, but now it ends on use another device. 4 devices, 3 updates and 3 new speakers sitting….waiting…

Partially, and that is the error that cannot be excused. 

But there are plenty of complaints about SMB v1 going away, which Sonos did to comply with the security obsessed posters who would flood this forum and Reddit with doom-and-gloom.  This is only partially Sonos’ fault (they picked a bad time to placate a group with very few, but extremely vocal members). 

Then there are those complaining about rooms selection, starting music in the wrong place, not being able to find sources, not knowing how to do X or Y, or complaining about the “intuitiveness” or “elegance” of the app in general.  These last complaints are identical to the sturm and drang of the last few overhauls, even down to the thread titles.  These are the ones Sonos chooses to ignore (and rightfully so). 

ETA: Then there is the fourth type, the posters who just want to fuel the torches and pitchforks mob and watch this forum burn.  Unfortunately for the mods, these types tend to produce sockpuppet offspring like rabbits, and tend to screw up anything resembling positive help or progress in solving issues. 

As said elsewhere, although a way off yet. Is this the beginning of the end for Sonos?

A terrible app, no apparent understanding of user needs, coupled with ever increasing prices and products that are no longer leader of the pack. Sonos is resting on past glories.

Like others no more Sonos purchases for me.

The forum posts are a microcosm of Sonos’s future, at least as it relates to their existing customers. There is a group that is bitter over the new app rollout and will no longer buy Sonos products.  There is another group that likes or at least has moved past problems with the new app and are excited about buying the headphones.  The app disaster, I think we can agree to call it that, will undoubtedly suppress sales, specifically headphone sales.  We are in the middle of this battle, when Sonos reports next quarter’s numbers we will have a better idea of the casualties.  

I'm a long-time and very satisfied Sonos customer currently using five Sonos speakers (with several upgrades). I have used Sonos app on my Android 9 phone (Samsung Galaxy S8) and Sonos S2 controller on my Windows 11 laptop with good results and fast, smooth updates UP TO NOW.

However, the latest app and controller updates have been very disappointing. The new app is slow to initialize, prone to connectivity outages, and seems to lack features present in previous versions.  For example, the previous Win 11 controller could search my OneDrive/Sound Recordings directory as part of my music library. That feature no longer works. The current phone app is a regression from previous versions with respect to speed and connectivity under the same conditions as previous versions.

I hope that these issues can be addressed or a return to previous versions of app and controller can be installed as a workaround.

Thanks, Bernie

For me the anger has now passed, to be followed by a slightly depressed resignation. I will come to like the new app once I get used to it - there are flickers of that already. But it is currently a mess of bugs and missing features (they removed the queue??? beggars belief - for me Sonos is the queue; listen now/next/end - party mix with friends)

They will eventually address all this, but I’d guess 6 months to get back to parity with S2

To risk their brand reputation in this way is also baffling. Sonos definitely aspire to be like Apple (hell, who doesn’t!) - I can tell you that Apple would never had compromised the user experience in this way. They dropped haptic buttons for the iPhone 15 for exactly that reason - showing actual courage, and that there was a fallback plan

I also think Sonos are going to see a significant exodus of staff as a result of this. We all like to bash software engineers - but they are professionals, and if it was me I would have no confidence in a company that’s prepared to ship something so substandard that it would make me ashamed to say where I worked.

You can also be sure those engineers were telling management for weeks that it wasn’t going to be ready, only to be ignored, yet still having to work their behinds off to get even this substandard release out the door. Not to mention the poor souls on the support staff who are having to deal with irate customers…