End of Software Support - Clarifications

The email I got from Patrick Spence below. Which fills me with no confidence:

We heard you. We did not get this right from the start. My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward: First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work just as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honour that investment for as long as possible. Whilst legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience. Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, whilst legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalising details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks. Whilst we have a lot of great products and features in the pipeline, we want our customers to upgrade to our latest and greatest products when they’re excited by what the new products offer, not because they feel forced to do so. That’s the intent of the Trade Up programme we launched for our loyal customers. Thank you for being a Sonos customer. Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. I hope that you’ll forgive our misstep and let us earn back your trust. Without you, Sonos wouldn't exist and we’ll work harder than ever to earn your loyalty every single day. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Sincerely, Patrick Patrick Spence CEO, Sonos Privacy Statement User Terms Unsubscribe Manage Email Preferences 2020 Sonos Europe B.V. All rights reserved. Sonos is a registered trademark of Sonos, Inc. All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Sonos Europe bv. Schuttersweg 10, 1217 PZ Hilversum, Nederland. To receive the latest updates from Sonos please add sonos@email.sonos.com to your address book. To view this email as a web page, click here. Moderator note: Not Happy Michael’s Email address has been removed for privacy.

Yeah, and when Spotify, the music service I use, upgrades its service, who's going to update Sonos so the two apps understand each other?

Sonos will work to maintain the existing experience and conduct bug fixes, but our efforts will ultimately be limited by the lack of memory and processing power of these legacy products.

Sonos actually owns the music service API, so there is a good chance whatever change Spotify makes will fit within the existing API.  If there is minor change required to the API, it sounds to me that Sonos would be willing to do the change.  A major change that won’t work within the limited memory won’t be done.  I don’t know that any one could tell you specifically what hypothetical future changes  would or would not get done.

Your rosy interpretation of that one  sentence ignores every later, specific company statements, such as the FAQ quoted below.

Also, just one month ago, Sonos released an update noting:

Spotify Changes: How Spotify connects to Sonos.
Starting soon, your Sonos players will need to be running software version 10.4 or higher in order to be controlled by Spotify apps running on your devices. If you have been keeping your system up to date, you will not notice any changes once this goes into effect. 

If that happens in July, the company has made it pretty clear (despite that one vague sentence) that Legacy will go without.. If that weren't true, it would be a pretty simple clarification to make. But Ryan S has confirmed it again and again and again.

@Whitenoise, the Spotify changes have already been done in v10.6, so no worries.

Sonos 10.6 Now Available

Such major changes don’t happen very often.

The changes warned about in those notes haven’t happened yet either. It’s the first time in a long time that I can think of where this has come up, and anyone who has updated to 10.4 or beyond won’t even notice it when the changes do kick in. When they do, at some point in the future, people not already running firmware 10.4 or higher on Sonos won’t be able to use their Spotify app to control the system until they update. And as mentioned, the team is going to try and provide bug fixes in the future for legacy devices, as the hardware permits. 

@Ryan S, Thanks for the clarification.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/08/france_fines_apple/

“Under Article 99 of France's 2015 Energy Transition Law, it's illegal for companies to deliberately shorten the life of a product to encourage people to purchase replacements. HOP argued that by slowing down aging phones, Apple was encouraging its customers to buy newer models.”

And will Spotify keep working on legacy products?

Read this …. will Spotify keep working on Sonos legacy systems. Or do we have to legally challenge them to stop this fiasco?  

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/08/france_fines_apple/