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Hello everyone,

We wanted to take a moment to address concerns regarding our new app that launched in May. At Sonos, delivering an exceptional experience is paramount to all that we do. Unfortunately, your experiences over the past several weeks have fallen short of our commitment to you.

Today, our CEO Patrick Spence published a letter that includes a detailed update on the progress we’ve been making and plans going forward. You can read the full letter here.

We sincerely appreciate your patience and continued support. We are working hard to earn back your trust and are more committed than ever to delivering a consistently great Sonos experience for everyone.

Thank you all for your patience,
Your Sonos Team

Any updates Patrick Spence ? or are you hiding !! 


I wonder what happened to the "biweekly cadence" of updates? The last one was Aug 27. The new app still takes several minutes to launch.


Any updates Patrick Spence ? or are you hiding !! 

He chooses not to engage with users in this community.


I wonder what happened to the "biweekly cadence" of updates? The last one was Aug 27. The new app still takes several minutes to launch.

There was a firmware update last Tuesday, iOS App update today and Android due 24th


Firmware update done. App update done. Nothing fixed. Just feels like the wheels are really coming off now.


I have also had servere issues. After the last firmware and software update I finally see improvements  E.g. app slowness has gone down. I have 11 devices bought over the last 11 years.


Bring back the old app which was reliable, responsive and everything worked like a charm. Place your new app in the shop and tinker as much as you want until it’s a quality product tried and true.  Then send it to the masses.


here we are several updates later, and it still doesn’t work. 


I wonder what happened to the "biweekly cadence" of updates? The last one was Aug 27. The new app still takes several minutes to launch.

There was a firmware update last Tuesday, iOS App update today and Android due 24th

and it still doesn’t work. 


So we are now into October, has there been a lot of improvement in the apps? I’m still using the old version because there were too many things that had been broken for my use case on the new one.

 


Unless you need a feature not supported by the old version, I recommend continuing as you are for a while longer.


Unless you need a feature not supported by the old version, I recommend continuing as you are for a while longer.

 

OK thanks for the reply, I will stick with this old version for now.

 


I noticed the other day that Sonos were being quoted as saying what they want to do for their customers and how they want to ensure the disaster that this new app has been won’t happen again… a bit late for that isn’t it?

If a company really values current customers and users, they would be honest when an update or new version is being released and tell those customers who have spent thousands of pounds what will be missing and what will not work with the new update.

In all my years of commercial software development, we’ve always had “pilot sites” where customers can volunteer to use the new version and they are fully informed what is and what isn’t fully functioning with the new version. Some of these pilots ran for 6 months+ before the software was deemed releasable.

It can probably be summed up as:-

  1. Don’t mislead your customers - be honest and keep them well informed
  2. Don’t promise things that you know won’t be achievable in the timescale
  3. Treat your customers with respect and value them
  4. Treat your employees with respect - don’t leave them to clear up the mess

Yes, there have been some “features” returned to the app recently but for me it still doesn’t work. I use a music library on my NAS and previously I would navigate to a folder and then place everything in the folder on the queue. Now I can only add more than 1 song by navigating to a folder that doesn’t have any sub folders. Luckily I can still do this on my pc version of the app but as my pc resides in the shed it’s a pain to have do this. Furthermore, it seems they have now broken the pc version by using SMB 3 with little or no backward compatibility. This means that at random times the pc version will lose the music library connection and the only option is to re-add it and then let it re-index which takes about 15 minutes on my system. All these things were working well before May. As a software developer myself I cannot understand why a company the size of Sonos takes so long to repair their software. These are not bugs but omissions.


I guess that some people were like me and lost the use of their entire system for many months.

was it really the case that the Management team were unaware of this possibility? Countless reboots, de- registers, re registers, set ups etc etc all to no avail.

It stinks to high heaven and complete ineptitude by the CEO for not having his finger on the pulse or worse. The guys a seasoned software man, so there are no excuses. Either they knew and didn’t care or they didn’t know and are clowns! 


Sonos should be SMBv2 capable too, though connections do seem to be brittle with the new app/software.


Am I the only one that the app doesn't open? I wait and wait and wait with the logo screen and nothing happens... It is frustating


It worked back couple of weeks on my side, and one more time yesterday, no more possibility to connect to my system with 10 speakers or equivalent… So annoying !

Thus, it’s great to recognize errors and give great vision for futur but why it is so weak with each update and killing the strategy and communication effort? Please Patrick and teams, make it happen quickly now 🤞


I wonder what happened to the "biweekly cadence" of updates? The last one was Aug 27. The new app still takes several minutes to launch.

There was a firmware update last Tuesday, iOS App update today and Android due 24th

macOS version is still dated the end of July.


I was able to resurrect my nas library via Windows pc app. I turned off Windows updates to block sonos there too using Android enough now with local library again. Poor support at top end


Since the last android update 80.09.04, everything works at 99%. Only the logo images of the stations are not displayed in the chosen player (or group) when starting playback…….


macOS version is still dated the end of July.

The Sonos desktop controllers are in ‘maintenance’ mode and have been for some years with no new features added. It’s likely these controllers will go at some point in the not too distant future and replaced with the Sonos web App. At least that’s what some users believe could happen. We will have to see what happens once the mobile App is up-to speed.


The issue with that is that browsers (and mobile devices) need to kept away from network file access for common sense security reasons. A web app can read files, but can’t really index them very easily because it’s abilty to wrote files is limited.

So the desktop apps are essential unless Sonos decides it’s basically a front end for streaming services and a hardware company. At which point it will cease to matter and get wiped out by Apple and Google (ignoring Amazon). 


The indexing is actually done by the speakers themselves. Wether or not you use the desktop application. However it is quite a pity that these desktop adds are being deprecated since they currently offer the best experience.


Interesting. Keeping hardware away from filesystems is an interesting challenge!