Tale of 2 households continues: 

When I posted about this subject shortly after May (in the now mostly abandoned posts from Spence and others when this crapapp was rolled out), our fingers were eagerly crossed that the so called leadership team would wake up and smell the coffee.  Now even the most hopeful of us who have posted on these forums for years have let up b/c the app and company is still broken bad! 

For household 1 that made the switch to the new app (accidentally), They are still having way too many issues to list and the outsourced, contracted CS is still garbage.  They invested a lot in Sonos gear (time and money) and guess what, they will NEVER spend another dime. 

Household 2 has been able to stay on 16.1 (despite Sonos’ many attempts to trick them into updating hardware and apps).  They had a shopping last spring that included 2 new Ports, 2 Amps, and 2 Era speakers.  Guess what? They will NEVER EVER make these purchases now. 

Outliers?? Not a chance if you read the current app reviews, news stories, and the thousands of negative posts on here and elsewhere.  Sonos executive leadership team should have been fired a long time ago along with the collusive board members who continue to shield this the broken c-suite. 

The corporate PR-speak that Keith listed above means NOTHING to any of these once loyal and repeat customers. 

I was about to start screaming at the bizarre behaviour of my speakers. Arbitrary AirPlay without the ability to locate “the source” at 8:00 pm every night, TV Arc lost the connection to a LG tv but joined the playing of some unknown AirPlay source and won’t reconnect to the TV. Apple did a major software upgrade, and so did SONOS and nothing is working.

Are you guys running for President?

Honestly, I’m 71, used to be a system administrator and used to be able to keep up on all this crap, but I’m ready to turn off everything and listen to the crickets.

Are you using SPOTIFY? There is a nasty quirk if a guest uses your SPOTIFY, then goes home. SPOTIFY will stay connected to the guest’s system and can play on your system. You  can stop this if you close your SPOTIFY client after the guest leaves.

oops when the new “take music control with you” sonos webb app will fail as well….probably...developers don’t spend enough time on “what can go wrong logic anymore”, just get it working and sell it..

How did you go back to original app??

I don't think you understand the situation at all. 

None of your platitudes help me. Without admitting you screwed up you seem to be saying you will do better in the future. "We won't be fooled again."

I had a working system that I liked and was slightly proud of. I was considering extending it.

Now, it doesn't work. Your app is still unusably bad. Integration with other systems (Spotify, Google Home) is broken. Even the volume controls don't work! 

I will never buy anything from you again. I will never advise anyone to buy from you. And I will, over time, replace your speakers with something I can trust.

I will never again buy hardware with a locked in software ecosystem.

You have taught me a life lesson the hard way, but trust me, I have learnt it.

Keith, did you sit down and compose that yourself? If so then I would strongly advise you to attend a plain English writing course as a matter of urgency. Here's a tip. Whenever you write something, email, letter, explanation of why decisions were taken or what plans there are for the future, ask yourself this question; will the recipient easily understand what I have said and, in this case, does it sound genuine?

I have now managed to trade my Play Five for Wiim Pro Plus. Dealer has said he will also accept my Port as a part trade-in for a new amp so that's going shortly. Still have a pair of Era 100's and a sub mini but will hold on to them for the moment.

Bad enough that Sonos unleashed that pig of an "upgrade" but then you compounded the problem by not allowing people to roll back to the version that worked. Fortunately, I managed to install the previous version but I cannot update my library while using it because you are attempting to force me to download the current version. No need to thank me for "all my support and patience" - it has now run out.

Obviously,  you care nothing about your many loyal customers and to be perfectly blunt I care nothing about a Company who treats its customers the way Sonos has. We are not five year old's so please stop issuing this Corporate nonsense. It doesn't work outside of California. Does it even work there? 

You are fooling nobody with half a brain cell to their credit.

Little in this statement commits to actually fixing the mess we are all left with. It’s great to hear that testing will be improved. But ‘improved’ from a pretty low baseline (as far as I can see) doesn’t mean reaching an acceptable level of performance. And what will happen the next time you want to release a buggy update to hit a hardware launch target?

Since the launch of the app, hardware firmware updates (not app updates) have broken displaying, sorting and playing compilation albums on local libraries for users. That isn’t addressed here. This was immediately evident to me, how much testing did that update receive? And when can I expect a fix?

Please start actually tracking known issues in a way that customers know when it will be fixed without having to beg for commitments through the forum. I really don’t care about your internal testing, corporate governance approach or bonuses, as a customer, I only care that the product that I paid for works - and that when problems do arise, they will be addressed.

What I love most about this statement is that the executives might not accept a bonus over the coming fiscal year. Which probably means, that even with a colossal strategic error with a huge effect on stock price and customer satisfaction, they did receive a bonus over the current fiscal year. And intend to keep it.

How we as a society created a world where that is "normal" is beyond me.

Make an update for the five so i can play music while it is not connected to the wifi and if you have any other procucts that have to use wifi to play music then you need to change that. Why did you make that a feature in the first place?

A bit off topic for this thread, but using spakers that are made to be part of a wifi multiroom sytem without wifi might not be a much used use case. Especially since using two phones (one for the Sonos app and the other providing wifi) seems to solve the problem.

I do remember reading though that the Five will play from a cable connected source without wifi if it is set to Line in via wifi first.

The changes seem to be around moving the entire ecosystem to the cloud.  Removing local network access and routing all streaming services through the Sonos cloud.

1. Is Sonos going to collect and monitize (now or in the future) user listening activity?
2. Will users have the option to use Sonos on a non internet connected network?
3. What if the internet goes out, will I be able to use my Sonos system locally, from a local music folder?
4. What if the Sonos cloud goes down?  Will streaming services still work?
5. Has there been a security audit of the Sonos cloud? Will you produce thouse results?
6. Why does the Sonos cloud not use 2FA?

I find this incredulous after just being hung up on my customer service and being told escalations are closed and they don’t know when they will reopen. So at 9:30 pst on a Tuesday, how is an entire department closed. And if you say you will hold, the customer service reps just hang up on you. Customer service and these products used to be awesome. My new products don’t work and the customer service is terrible. Wish I hadn’t just added to our system and just changed brands. 

I agree, would love to see a Sonos response on these questions. But they do not answer these questions… 
 

Sonos please response, in detail, and show us that the new “quality and customer experience commitments” are true. 

I’m not going to put on my lawyers had and nitpick their statement.  I will say this is the FIRST time since the fiasco started that I’ve heard anything from these guys that suggests maybe they now understand what they’ve done, and they actually want to do what can be done to fix it.

I WAS able to get into their tech support team, and we did (in theory) get access back to my music on my laptop (MacBook), but it still feels kludgy as hell.  Does anybody know if this is to be the permanent fix, or if the pending changes will make all that feel more permanent, and more natural?

I’m going to go look now, to see what this latest app update is supposed to cover, in HOPES it finally resolves the big issue they dumped on us back in May.  So overall, a good step, in the right direction.  But it’s going to take YEARS to recover the trust with these guys from my end at least.

This move to the cloud feels like Sonos trying to open up new revenue streams by monetizing user activity and I suspect forcing users into a cloud subscription service to use existing equipment or services.

Maybe they will offer something new or "AI" supported music assistant based on listening history.  

But this whole things feels like a shift from a speaker company to a cloud and data company.

A new way to offer ads to the end user where they could no do so before.

Why would they need a cloud based system to collect your data, when they’ve been collecting your data since day 1?  All of which is written quite plainly in their privacy statement, which also states what they do with the data (Hint: They don’t sell it).  So you can put away the tinfoil beanie.

Current features will need to remain free, they aren’t gonna paywall volume control etc  

But it’s possible that new features that leverage cloud or ai could be paywalled. I don’t think they will, but they need to make money to keep the lights on and the music service cloud api running etc. It’s gotta be tough to do this when you sell hardware that lasts ~ a decade for the most part. 

Never said anything about selling the data, they dont need to sell it to make money off it, offer personalized ads, or subscriptions services.

Second, there is nothing preventing Sonos from changing the privacy policy once the whole cloud ecosystem gets up and running.  Based on past experience with the app and executive communications, I have no faith in the company to do right by the consumer going forward.  Especially when they urgently need a constant revenue stream.  Selling hardware does not provide recurring income.  

You didn’t answer the question - Why would they need a cloud based system to collect your data, when they’ve been collecting your data since day 1? 

And the FTC prevents Sonos from changing their privacy policy:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/protecting-consumer-privacy-security/privacy-security-enforcement

Didn’t sonos use to collect use data, and we could check how long devices had been used.

Can’t seem to find that any more on my account...

Sonos always collected data.  It’s been in their privacy policy for decades.

As to us seeing the data, they closed off much of that diagnostic area because a few hundred people left their networks open to the public and a couple hackers got in.  A few unscrupulous websites sounded the alarm (about Sonos being “hackable”, not the fact that they left their networks wide open), so we lost all that functionality.

This whole conversation is academic.  My point is that the direction the company is moving appears to be away from hardware to a more cloud based software environment.   As to personal data usage I have not seen any action from the company that would make me trust them to safeguard my data and not exploit it for profit.  From experience when companies go all in on the cloud they are chasing a profits and the cloud hype train, often in a desperate attempt to raise revenue due to a failing core business.  This is itself is not bad, as long as it is done correctly and smartly.  

I got into the Sonos world because of the very high quality speakers offered.  Now they are functionally unusable.  

Nothing that management has done thus far has proven to me that they intend to focus on the existing user experience, people with perfectly functional legacy hardware.  Due to that lack of trust I do not plan on buying any more expensive hardware from them.  

When the app fiasco that rendered a lot of systems unusable and/or people not being able to see their local libraries, I did NOT update my Sonos system via the PC application, as I was still able to use it from that application and use SonoPhone for mobile control as needed. I have been reluctant update the Sonos system software itself because I was concerned I would lose my current functionality. If I go the iOS app, it wants me to update the system, but I am afraid to do so.

Has anyone been in the same boat, but updated recently? I’m curious as to what happened.

Thanks for any input.

 

BRING THE PLAYLISTS BACK!