shame sonos online campaign

Utterly pointless...

Just take a read of the early section of the transcript from the earnings call last week, regarding app fixes. You will imagine yourself as a crusader, but nothing you do will make an ounce of difference vs what has been done already over the last three months, which has led to this response from the company:

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/08/08/sonos-sono-q3-2024-earnings-call-transcript/

By the way, Twitter is now called X, and trending there is of no consequence in 2024.

As technology  changes, some learning effort is required.

At the beginning of the 20th century (and even into 50's and 60's and beyond for some very remote areas) telephones included a crank on the side. Many people did not understand how to use a phone that did not have a crank and that dial tone was puzzling. Then the the sudden need to remember 7-10 digits for each friend as dial phones were introduced became an unbelievably difficult requirement. Try to teach a great grandfather or grandmother how to operate that rotary thing.

Well, analogies are always tricky, but if we’re going with the telephone model, seems to me what SONOS did was like sneaking into the customer’s house while everyone was asleep, disconnecting the crank phone and leaving the new dial phone for the customer to wire back into the network when they woke up the next morning. That’s perhaps an exaggeration on the other side, but some significant number of SONOS customers clearly feel this has been done to them, and whether or not the participants on this forum have any sympathy for those customers, SONOS would be well-advised to take them seriously (in my humble opinion).

At this point patience is a virtue. Sonos has provided a rough schedule for its anticipated further development of its new app. It seems to indicate most functions will be restored and the app should be reasonably reliable in ‘September/October.’ People are certainly free to abandon the Sonos ship before then, although that seems a bit rash and counterproductive if you’re already invested in Sonos hardware.

Sonos management has acknowledged the new app is seriously flawed. Sonos’ CEO advised investors the company will spend tens of millions working on the app; vows we will be ‘delighted’ when the work is completed; and has delayed release of new products until the app has been thoroughly sorted out.

Piling on with complaints now is a futile endeavor. Hopefully patience will be rewarded with a new, and if not improved, at least restored Sonos app. It’s time to ‘hurry up and wait.’

Let’s hope they are able to stick to this revised schedule for the return of missing features because they do not have a good track record thus far. In any case IMO this is still much too long to get back to system parity and they are deserving of every criticism they get. 
 

Also keep in mind the schedule is about missing features. The app seems to be getting g more reliable with each release but it could still be much longer for them to fix the reliability issues especially since they are introducing new bugs.

I actually came across a person who likes the new App. Obviously, he does not need any of the functionality that is currently compromised.

Some issues that some users are experiencing are clearly network related. The new App uses the network diffently. I can only speculate why SONOS felt these changes were desirable, but here we are.

My own network deals with these changes without fuss. Other networks could deal with the changes if some simple configuration changes can be made. This is where learning enters the equation. Unfortunately, I think that some network gear does not support the standards very well and must be replaced.

A detail that is lacking at the moment is a reliable list of gear that can successfully be reconfigured or will never work well. There is a list for the older SONOS Apps and firmware.

Bit early for panto…

On the other hand I guess Sonos started it… 

It depends why someone decides to abandon. For some people who are affected this could be the first where they find out how critical the software outside the hardware is to the streamer working correctly. For others it may not be the issue itself, but the handling and support of the situation by Sonos. Like insurance, until you need it you don’t really know how good support is.

It’s not always just about needing to wait for them to fix, because what happens next time they mess up?

It is two apps, one android, one ios. If they are really spending tens of millions to fix two apps then it is going to be a long wait. That sort of budget for app development is far more than a few months work. I’d be surprised if the development team can expand much.

There are limits to how much can be developed in parallel in a single app. It is unusual to be able to turn 6 months of team development into 1 month by adding 5 more teams with no or limited experience of the code.
6 months is for illustration only I have no idea how much work is required for what they need to do, but they are unlikely to be able to just add more developers to significantly reduce the time required.
Additionally, too many changes at once can create even more confusion and make it more difficult to pin-point which code is the cause if there are issues with it.

Unintentionally or not @sigh, you’ve summarized an absolutely legendary book …

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer.