Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

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. 

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.

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!