Huh. Still don't want to load.

This explains why my alarm woke me up with a Sonos chime rather than Radio 2 again...

Not good enough. I spent thousands of pounds on building my Sonos system and I chose it because I could listen to my personal music library.

Telling that there is no thumbs down on this article.

Very poor

Was it just me who received a blank email initially from the CEO and only the second, a day later, that contained the apology? Accidental missing details or not written - just sounds like the new code

 

I just got this. Oh. Just noticed my recently played don't want to load.

 

 

Same for me. This new app is so slow and unresponsive on iOS. If I try to restart a Sonos or other playlist from the ‘recent played’ list it throws an error every time.

There can be no valid apology for releasing an app that is so bad and cannot be rolled back. I understand the need to replatform the app due to outdated technology but if a b2b tech company released a replacement app that had so many fundamental issues they would be sued by their existing customers and lose many of them outright.

Sonos know their existing user base have little choice but to wait because of the huge investment in hardware we have all made. It is so disappointing from a company that was the market leader in multi room technology.

My biggest concern is the prolonged impact on current sales this could have, leading to dire consequences for the company.

Philip's email has been woefully slow and frankly doesn't address the fact that he allowed the release of a half-baked app, which was to enable the sale of his new shiny headphones.

I’d strongly suggest he does the following:

1.  Rollback the app for speakers to function as they did.
2.  Leave the new app for headphones or those that wish to be ‘live’ beta testers.
3.  Rigorously test the new ground up app.
4.  Beta test properly and work on feedback.
5.  Rollout the new all singing all dancing FULLY FUNCTIONING app with the option to update or remain with the one they know works until feedback is favourable and the app is stable.

I did love my speakers but hate my 'Sonos roulette' of will it won't it find my speakers, play the speakers I expect it to, play and not drop out, or indeed play what I want it to play, really takes the enjoyment out of the whole system.

Sonos, you need to do a whole lot better and this should not take 5 months (if that is to be believed) to fix something that was fundamentally not broken and restore functions you knew were not going to work, when you forced us to update.

I look forward to my thoughts being totally ignored but feel better for yet again venting my utter frustration at this travesty of a rollout.

Too little too late as far as I am concerned.

They knowingly released a half finished app just so they could start selling the headphones with very little or even no regard to current users who have loyally supported Sonos for many years. Then they had the gall to say that they were being brave!

Even if they do manage to hit the deadlines it will still be a 5 months wait for people to get their systems back to a state they were in before Sonos decided to ruin it for them.

Fortunately I managed to stop the auto update on one of my Android devices so I am still running the old app but I had to completely uninstall Sonos from my other devices which were infested with this garbage before I realised what was going on. I have to manually select the apps to update on the Android phone so that it doesn’t update the Sonos app.

I've held off from commenting on these forums, as I don't think I was going to say anything that hadn't already been said. But after Patrick Spences recent letter, I'm now angry enough that I'm going to, just to make myself feel better. 

My investment in Sonos gear goes to the tune of £2200. And that's just the gear I currently own, not the previous now obsolete stuff. 

It is NOT ACCEPTABLE for Sonos to downgrade my system while they're spending 3-4 months working out how to 'improve volume responsiveness'! It's an audio system for patrick’s sake, volume is the first thing. You should be ashamed that this has to be on your bugfix list.

What you should have done is, wait until the new app was feature parity with the old one, then release, while maintaining the old app for, say, a year. Most software companies have a plan for introduction and obsolescence, but not Sonos, it seems. 

I was able maintain my system for a while on the old app, but now I can't even do that. It feels like we're being railroaded into this crap new world.

If I wasn't so invested, I'd dump the gear and go. I really hate the new UI. And I work in UI development.

Thank you for listening to me shout into the void.

I wasn’t suggesting that nobody was running the old app. I think the context of my message was self-evident, in that people are demanding an ‘official’ path to downloading the old app.  After all, there wouldn’t be hundreds of messages demanding something that was readily available.  And I don’t doubt that anyone’s messages carry no weight in here, including my own.  That said, there remains no evidence that the old app is coming back — officially.  

This is impressive. Two months to craft a response and another three to deliver a functional product. 
 

The best part of half a year without a functioning system. At least offer the ability to return to a pre May 7 app while you mass beta test the current abomination. At this point I’m not sure if it’s arrogance, stubbornness, or plain stupidity. Either way, my next speaker purchase will not be with Sonos. 

Too little, too late for what happened and no clear explanation of how and why it happened 

It’s certainly impacted my purchasing decisions. 

As it stands I’m still using the old app to just about continue to use my Sonos system (iPad and other desktop apps). However, now it knows it needs updates, certain function gets greyed out, so adding anything to my system is a non-starter as I will not be upgrading anytime soon. My iPhone has become a beta test device that I can’t undo. 

So even if I wanted to buy anything new, effectively I can’t as new stuff and a hopeless system is worse than a just about functioning system. 

With the timelines for getting back functionality in the ‘new’ app slipping further right, the corporate decision to foist this mess on everyone to sell some headphones over the summer is going to look pretty bad when no-one buys in the lead up to Xmas. 

Right now, even if the app suddenly gets fixed (and responds when you press a button, not randomly many seconds after) I still don’t know if I will invest any more money in Sonos if this is indicative of how they treat their customers going forward. 

Apology NOT accepted. 

Sonos are not the only players in the arena, like they once were. There is plenty of competition out there, and a lot of it is extremely good.

I have a Cambridge Audio based hifi system and I know I won’t be expanding my Sonos system any further.
 

There are countless Bluetooth headphone makers out there, and Sonos have totally misjudged the Ace too, primarily as it doesn’t behave as just another zone player.

Indeed. I’m more than happy with my B&W Px8’s as headphones and wouldn’t even think of Sonos for that as I don’t see what functional benefit they would provide. 

Likewise for more critical listening I use Naim, and am starting to wonder if I should go there for multi-room stuff now. At least the Move doubles up as a decent bluetooth speaker. Starting to feel like recently buying a couple of ports was a big mistake. 

I'm glad to see that an issue with the app has been acknowledged. It has been months of frustration since the update with half of our speakers being unresponsive, showing empty playlists at -1 volume whilst still playing the last loaded music!

Trying to play anything on these gets the Something Went Wrong pop up.

I'm looking forward to a fix for this as we have a household of non functioning speakers right now.

Even worse - they are not actually saying about restoring volume control performance to acceptable state, or on par with the old S2 app in these five months.
They just say “Improving Volume responsiveness”.
‘Improving’ is sooooo elastic term… :)
They can continue “improving” endlessly for months and years to come.

“An app is never finished” (C) SONOS

You said it the best. Too little, too late. I’m out. I’ll be selling my Sonos products, starting next week. That’s ~$3000 worth of equipment I had invested, thanks very much Sonos. 
 

PS: Spence, you should resign.

Yes I think two months into this disaster it should be clear, considering the share price and the incompetence as well as incapacity to fix this mess, that the only way forward is for the CEO to resign. It's just too little too late.

This last apology is probably some sort of goodbye letter. Fittingly enough, they weren't even able to send that one through without yet another major cringe.

The last nail in the coffin for me was that they stopped the old app from being able to control the system. Now they actually force you to use that half baked app. 

An please stop this web interface. It's just the biggest security issue ever as I don't trust you guys as a company anymore. 

What have you done Spence?!?! 

If you’re having difficulties using the updated Sonos controller App, then (if not done already) maybe reproduce any issue(s) seen, submit a Sonos system diagnostic report from within the App (if practicable), note it’s reference and/or gather any relevant screenshots/screen-recordings and contact/chat with Sonos Support Staff via this LINK and see what the Staff can perhaps suggest to help you to resolve the matter.

Even if their support lines are busy at times, there are undoubtedly some quiet periods when you may get through quickly and it’s better than having a household of non functioning speakers. My controllers are working okay and the speakers are playing here, so it is likely your issues might get resolved sooner, rather than perhaps later.

i think sonos should refund users the £4 for sonophone/sonopad whilst developments to software are made every 2 weeks.

Does that still work after the latest firmware update?

That App is only available on iOS controllers - so seems a little unfair. It’s also a users choice to purchase that App, or not.

I personally think it hindered some things, because rather than reporting issues to Sonos with the new Sonos App, some user just switched to such 3rd-party Apps and likely didn’t report the issues seen in the new Sonos App. If Sonos were thinking of giving something to ‘existing’ S2 users affected then there are probably much better ways to go about these things. 

I have been a real believer in Sonos products for about 10 years. Sonos products were so nice and the application experience so superior I felt the premium cost was justified.

This latest major application update did a lot to change my feelings towards Sonos. I am a lot more skeptical now. I know I am not the only one, and the email from the Sonos CEO shows that Sonos management are aware of it. I imagine all Sonos users have had to go through the resets and restarts and struggles with the app so telling stories here won’t help the cause of Sonos users.

As a Sonos user it isn’t apologies that are going to do it for me - it is fixing the application so I can return to the seamless experience Sonos used to provide me.

If you think Sonos is just going to magically go back to the 16.2 app, you really don’t understand this fiasco of a release at all. 

Wow, I just found this after 2 weeks of trying to reconnect my speaker to the app after it just stopped working. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the app several times, performed reboots and factory resets on the speaker carried out every instruction I could find and now I’m stuck with a redundant speaker that the app won’t recognise and the S1 app won’t work with because it keeps telling me only the S2 app is suitable for my product. I called the Sonos helpline, estimated wait time 90 mins, no one available on the chat function so now I find out this is probably down to a bug in the new app and I might have to wait a month or two before it’s fixed !!!, plus I now keep getting emails offering me discount on new products which if I hadn’t seen this I might possibly have considered, now all I want to do is chuck it in the bin…..and for the record the apologies don’t really mean a great deal, it's not the first time I’ve had issues with it, as far as Im concerned it’s overpriced too so I won’t ever be getting another sonos product again 

Yes, Ios only