Yes but a (templated) response from the CEO is not the same as actual action - so, theoretically I can now add my library back to my S2 network - but guess what? The add button never comes to life...you guys are really astonishing, it's no wonder you are getting the community responses that fill this site.

READ THE ROOM guys...make it work or you are done as a business for a long time.

I think it means they are lost...not listening to customer concerns and so busy thinking about new toys that they forgot the service they were supposed to provide.

Its what is known in the UK as ‘BOLLOCKS’...or Corporate back peddling after being caught out not serving your customers.

I’m not even sure it rates as back peddling. It’s on the same level as the usual insincere canned statements companies give out, like how privacy and security is important after systems have been raided and databases copied out. If it was important more would have been done to prevent it.

As an end user it is irrelevant to me that the app is a ground up rewrite or that discovery was changed from ssdp to mDNS. Good engineering teams regularly make decisions like that. They aren’t decisions made lightly and a good team clearly communicates the impact and appropriate timeframes. Good management listen to the reasons it is necessary, potential impact to end users and delivery dates. The same as it is irrelevant what internal mountains Sonos need to climb when they choose the date it will all happen. When they control everything, the app, the cloud platform and the devices it is their job to ensure the date they choose to release is realistic. As a company it is their job to ensure those changes are irrelevant to me and when they state all the features I currently enjoy will be in the new app that they are there the day the app is released.

As a technical person I am interested in how they managed to mess it up so badly and speculate on what went wrong. It’s not that difficult to piece together at the high level and things like the app rewrite/discovery mechanism being waves as reasons are just smoke screens and irrelevant to the all green light “good to go” internal decisions made which caused the mess on the company chosen release date.

Its what is known in the UK as ‘BOLLOCKS’

Indeed. It seems that Sonos management are betting the future of the business on the assumption that the vast majority of their existing customers are so heavily invested in the Sonos ecosystem that those customers will stay put, and that new customers will continue to purchase, being unaware of the issues. There is no other plausible explanation for treating customers like pieces of excrement floating down the Thames.

Only time will tell if that assumption is correct.

I'm just glad I stayed on S1, probably £3k worth of speakes (small fry to some on here).

Very nearly bought an ARC to replace our Playbar 5.1 system but after the debacle with that I held off.

Now this (Sonos S3?), completely ruining people's systems.

Just goes to show even though you pay good money for your speakers you never truely own them.

I bought a 2nd hand ZP90 just to stop my system updating to S2 (when you had to fail update to get rid of the bloomin banner).

Genuinely feel sorry for all affected users, Sonos equipment is not cheap by any means..

Great email as it were….but….when the latest update pushed out 9 days ago bricked the entire music library. You should have been working day and night to at least get that fixed and pushed it out within 2 days if not hours. NINE DAYS later and nothin.  

So, I call BS to your entire campaign to ‘earn back our trust.’ I love Sonos but your lackadaisical response to the trainwreck we are all having to suffer is incompressible 

After 2 days and numerous hours, including #15 in the queue for help, I have given up. I Have tried every single thing I found on the internet and I CANNOT get my speakers to connect. So with that said, and a patio party coming up, I’m purchasing some new speakers, not Sonos. You had a flawless system and then you didn’t. I have not been able to listen to my music library on my speakers for months. Before I just picked up an iPad of my laptop and it was flawless.

App still will not work. Does not find my system no matter what I do. This is absolute bullshit.

I have moved to BlueSound and it is great.  I have playlists, local library access to my music.

to little to late.  16 pieces of Sonos gone.

I read this note while not being able to connect to TuneIn radio stations (again, a function your app says is working,  maybe you should try it cause it isn't) I am reminded of my deep frustrations with Sonos.

I am frustrated that your road map does not even include fixing listening to podcasts from the phone app.

So, I have no music library,  no ability to listen to podcasts from the app, volume controls that don't funtion, an App that has to be opened multiple time to work, and once again no radio stations.

This email does not feel sufficient given I have 9 speakers and you have taken 3 months failing to fix a system that you chose to revamp when it worked well.

Failure in leadership. 

Hi Patrick.

Firstly, thanks for the apology… Appreciated.

I agree that progress is being made but your quality control still leaves a lot to be desired.
e.g. With the new 16.3 firmware update you made things worse for many of your user base where you broke Music Library “Imported Playlists” and “Compilations”. These previously worked fine under 16.2 firmware.
 

Also, I would hope that a high priority would be to add back A-Z positioning into your Music Library Artists/Albums which was present in your old app but missing from your new app. This is not a requirement for scrolling through small music libraries but pretty much essential for easy positioning into large music libraries.
3rd party apps like SonosPhone/SonoPad can currently do this so I am unsure why you can’t easily add this functionality back. I don’t see this mentioned in your future update schedule, but hope you will address this sooner rather than later.

FYI: My personal experience with the new app has improved dramatically since you resolved the cloud server issues that resulted in flaky UX responses for your users in the pacific/Asia region. Thank you for sorting this out in a reasonably timely manner.
 
I am looking forward to 6 months time when hopefully Sonos is still in business and the nightmare of the last few months is a distant memory.

Ross.

Blimey Ross are you on the payroll ??

The whole app is a diaster, why give the man credit 

He is paid a lot of money and a limp couple of lines on this forum hardly cuts it does it ,?

The mac desktop app still works like the old one as a work around for anyone with a laptop (at least until they decide to “upgrade” that one too).  I only use ours while sitting at work now because I can’t get the ios app to do anything besides encourage me to swear a lot. If they break that I’m done. 

So we have to suffer the app for 6 months more until you bring the features and use ability of the old app. Why bother just admit the anpp is garbage and release the old app asap !!

Nice to see an acknowledgement but when the app still can’t even connect to speakers months later, it means nothing.

When are you going to fix even the most basic function of playing to connect speakers?

To be clear before this major update we had no issues, so don’t even suggest that it might be related to local network or anything it wouldn’t have worked before this update if that was the case and yes we have tried reboots of all equipment.

When the app first came out it wouldn’t even connect to other play 5’s, a firmware update seems to have sorted that but not the connect which is now a brick :(

Thanks for the apology but why can't they just not change what works well? The whole system is based on the fact that you can only access your music library with the Sonos app, no bluetooth, no physical connection... What a fiasco!! 

Leaving aside that an actual sincere apology - which this isn’t - is long overdue, our mothers all taught us that words are cheap, but actions talk. With that in mind, Patrick, your answer to this unmitigated disaster is to double down on its origin and inflict more rushed, untested software updates on us, who are over a barrel? And with a roughly “two week cadence”? Speak English, please, not bad business BS, and tell us the only possible solution: that you will give us all back the old app that actually functions, file the new crap in the dust bin of historically bad decisions, and then resign.
 

Patrick Spence, please resign now.

And that would make what material difference to you or your speakers…? 

I’d be more optimistic about the future of Sonos and that they won’t repeat this fiasco again. I’d also hope for a person who communicates better who rebuilds the trust in this company. I currently have none left.

In the moment, nothing probably.  It might be though, that if you believe a ship is headed in the wrong direction (cheap headphones unconnected to the Sonos ecosystem outside of a app that can be compared to a pile of dog-leavings) you just might request that the captain be replaced.

Yes, but the crew remains the same, including the navigation officer who the captain entrusted with using a decent telescope and map… 

It seems clear the app was simply not ready for release but had to be if Sonos were going to launch their headphones on time. So let existing users deal with a beta release or risk profits. We got the stinky end of the stick no surprise there. Short term profit over everything. How corporate.  Personally speaking, what are my alternatives? Sell everything for another system at great expense and probably less functionality (if everything was working!) or wait for Sonos to get their act together. That’s the calculation that’s been run and Sonos get away with releasing junk that they’ll fix later. It’s not the end of the world but something I’ll bear in mind when making any significant investments in their products. For me it simply makes Sonos no different from any company. More fool me for thinking otherwise.

You don’t know anything about the crew.  You only know that:

• They’re probably human and deserve the same respect as a stranger on the street
• They enabled one of the worst, if not the worst, events in the company’s history

We can continue any analogy to its exhaustion, and I’m sure it will fall apart somewhere.  The fact that the leader is (in my opinion) willingly allowing this brand to suffer from the company’s own actions, or lack thereof, is incredible.