Sonos, c’mon. It’s been 5 months since the version 80 app release and you’ve been making promises the whole time of us seeing improvements and after 5 months it’s just not working. Please just admit the full depth of the debacle and roll all the software back and give us back the working version.
As I type, my wife is listening to music in the kitchen and I like what I’m hearing so I fire up the Sonos app on my phone to see what’s playing in the kitchen and the app swears up and down “No content” in the kitchen zone, even after force-quitting and restarting the app.
My core needs and user journey are pretty simple:
- fire up the app and have it connect instantly and with zero fuss
- search for music and find what I’m looking for
- add it to the queue, maybe reorder the queue
- control playback (pause, resume, skip among songs with back/forward or by random access in the queue) with no lag
- create groups for multi-room playback
- control volume (in one zone or several) with no lag
Version 80 broke ALL of this at once. Since then, you’ve added the queue back, thank goodness, and it sort of works, but only sort of, and the rest of the above -- which is all core, P0, non-negotiable, table stakes functionality -- is still largely broken.
ALL of this worked fine prior to version 80. So it’s really hard to accept any sort of explanation that the old app was a crumbling heap of tech debt and you had to rip the bandaid off to start over, because from the outside… it actually worked. And it’s even harder to accept this explanation you’re giving us about the necessity of a rewrite when that was couched in “at least the new architecture is so clean we can update it every 2 weeks and so it shipped pretty bare at first but you’ll be seeing rapid improvements” but 5 months later, that just doesn’t appear true either.
The new search takes far too many taps -- if I search for a song name, the search results start showing me the artist for the song but not the song itself, I need to scroll to the right for that. Sometimes the search will just fail or have high latency. Last night I saw a bug where after searching for a song and scrolling right to see it, the search screen would show it for about half a second then go entirely blank.
The queue is back, thank goodness. But about half the time when I tell a song to add to queue or “play next”, the app freezes for 5 seconds then shows a top toast saying “unable to add to queue” -- but if I look in the queue, the action DID take hold and the song DID end up in the queue.
The app is super laggy; often after changing songs or changing volume it can be a couple seconds for the local, in-app screen to update, and several more seconds after that for the Sonos hardware to respond.
Multi zone volume control used to be a thing of beauty -- I could drag my finger across the volume control for one zone, and the linked sliders would all dance in synchrony, and all the speakers would also be immediately changing volume at the same time, no perceptible lag -- a true user delight. No more. Now it feels like the sliders for different zones are connected by rubber bands, and this is just in the local on-device UI! When the speakers actually change volume after that is anyone’s guess.
I’ve been a Sonos customer since 2007. I’ve got probably 30 devices (combination of Amp, Port, OneSL, Five, Arc, Sub) across 3 houses for me and my extended family. I could even understand your reasons for the S1/S2 split and wasn’t one of the customers who was angry about that, and for what it’s worth I retired/upgraded my older devices and went all in on S2. It all worked great and I was very happy with it until May 2024 and “Version 80”. It’s been a continuous source of frustration since then. And heartache -- because I loved it so much and it’s impossible to love now.
It’s gotten so bad I often just use Bluetooth to my AVR or random portable speakers (despite the much lower sound quality, despite the many problems with Bluetooth) because… that will actually work with so much less frustration.
I can't believe I’m actually typing this. I willingly spent thousands on Sonos gear to avoid those problems with Bluetooth etc… and now I’m back to Bluetooth because it works better. High irony.
I really wanted to be patient and give y’all the benefit of the doubt, but after this many months and this many releases and this many half-baked apologies, I’m just left with the frustration. Please just restore the old functionality we all paid thousands for. Just release the previous-version app and call it S2 Frozen or whatever. Yes, I realize you’ve rolled out software updates to the Sonos hardware devices themselves that make them no longer speak to that version of the app. But that’s all just software, so roll that back too.
