Move or roam as surround speakers

Bought my pair today and was surprised to find they cannot be used as rear speakers, one would definately suppose so! 
 

Pls make it happen!

I’d buy another Roam if this were an option. I bought the first one to use outside on the deck - which it’s been great for. It would be really cool if I could also use them downstairs as rears for a surround setup. In our small room that serves as living, dining, and kitchen there’s really nowhere to put permanent rears that wouldn’t be an eyesore.

@Sonos - I’d buy another Roam now if I new this was on the product roadmap. Just can’t justify it until I know it’s planned for the current hardware. Also leaning towards a Beam gen 2 and Sub, this would push me over the edge.

Sonos does not publish a product roadmap.  

For the price of Sonos products we should be able to fly them to the moon never mind using a feature which  could easily be implemented. Yes, you have speakers available for surround in the One SL however all Sonos speakers including the Roam should be able to link for 5.1, you have two main speakers available so why not have the Roam link up for surround?

Can't see the logic in having these as portable speakers only......

How do you know it would be easy to implement?  if you’re assuming that it’s easy to implement, that may be why it doesn’t seem logical to you. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against the feature.  I’m just can’t assume it’s easy to developed, would be easy to operate, and would actually satisfy complaints since you wouldn’t be able to easily use other features of the Roam, and perhaps wouldn’t bring in enough additional revenue to justify the cost.  Don’t know.  The fact that no other portable speaker can do this, as far as I know, doesn’t make me think it’s as plausible a feature as it may seem on the surface.  I don’t see the point in making assumptions that happen to fit the narrative, when you can just let it be known that it’s feature you would use and perhaps buy more products if it existed.

Mate.....c'mon..…

This is obviously a way to get sales for the 'one', with the R&D Sonos has available, adding software is not difficult.

Laugh. The engineers I work with would be happy to argue that point with you, and you also need to consider the electronic parts involved to make such a function work may not exist in these devices, a conscious choice to save manufacturing costs. 

The point is, however, making assumptions about Sonos’ business reasons is an unlikely story for success, unless you work within the organization, and have direct knowledge, one way or the other. 

I choose to believe that they’re not intent on ‘evil’ per se, and there must be valid reasons as to why they chose this path, beyond the rather simple ‘obvious way to get sales of the ‘one’ (sic)’ that you state. 

If I had a nickel for every time a layman told this SE how easy a software change would be and was off by a country mile, I could buy half of New York City.   Stay in your lane, "mate".

It’s just a few lines of code really. Getting the 0s and 1s in the correct order surely can’t take that much effort..

That’s another poor assumption.  The Sonos Roam costs $180, while the Sonos One SL costs $200.   Perhaps they make more profit on the SL, but that conclusion is far from obvious.  And, you’re ignoring the fact that ikea speakers, including the $100 bookshelf speakers  can be used as rear surrounds.  If Sonos wanted to push Sonos One sales instead of Roam, why would they allow cheaper alternatives at all?  And of course, as has been pointed out several times in this thread, many people cannot plug in a speaker in the surround sound locations, and battery is the only option.  So those people don’t buy any surround speakers.

If you’re argument is that a customer wanted portable speakers and surround speakers and thus would just buy two Roams instead of 1-2 Roams and 2 Sonos One SLs...I think you’re underestimating how difficult it would be to manage all those features in a single device.  It sounds easy in theory, but in practice, I think it would be complicated and leave customers frustrated. 

Again, that’s not even considering whether the hardware is there,  the development costs for the feature, making changes to setup to accommodate ease of use, testing the feature to make sure it’s actually reliable, impacts on other features Sonos may be planning, etc.

I say all this knowing full well that Sonos could bring in the feature at the next release, and assuming it works reliably, I’d be happy to see it done.  I just don’t see that point of making blind assumptions that it’s all easy.  For one thing, if it was so easy, then the market would be full of portable wireless speakers that can act as rear surround speakers.