Retired Sonos Staff

End of Software Support - Clarifications

Dec 8, 2022 11:29 AM UTC
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We announced yesterday that some of our oldest Sonos products will be moving into a legacy mode in May of 2020. Our commitment is to support products with regular software updates for a minimum of five years after we stop selling them, and we have a track record of supporting products far longer.

Here is some public information we’ve shared, gathered into one place to respond to some of your questions in one easy thread, so that people can find the correct information easily.

Beginning in May, software updates and new features from Sonos will only be delivered to systems with only modern products.

After May, systems that include legacy products will continue to work as before - but they will no longer receive software updates or new features.

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.

We don’t expect any immediate impact to your experience, but access to services and overall functionality will eventually be disrupted, particularly as partners evolve their own services and features.

Customers with both legacy and modern products have time to decide what option is best for them. You can continue to use your whole system in legacy mode - in this case, it will stop receiving updates and new features.

You will also be able to separate your legacy products from your modern products, so that the modern products can still receive updates and new features, and legacy products can still be used separately. We’ll have more information on how to do this in May when you can take that action.

Another option available to all customers with legacy products is to take advantage of the Trade Up program, which allows you to upgrade older Sonos products to modern ones with a 30% discount. Trade Up will be open to customers at any time should they decide to upgrade.

We recognize this is new for Sonos owners, just as it is for Sonos. We are committed to help you by making options available to you to support the best decision for your home.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate with asking.

Update 2/22: A message from our CEO

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 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 honor that investment for as long as possible. While 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, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalizing details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.

While 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 program 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.

Patrick Spence
CEO, Sonos

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106rallye

I think you misunderstood the final outcome of the S1/S2 split. The outcome is that S1 would still be supported for years to come, but that it would still receive safety updates, but no feature updates. So S1-systems will continue to receive updates. Sonos has not changed anything in it’s policy about supporting old OS’s. So your system will update and in my experience most updates will require an updated app, whence you run in to the problem you experienced: a no longer supported OS.

I think we disagree about who should think about the consequences of owning a phone with an unsupported OS - it’s owner or Sonos, though I do feel, as stated earlier, that Sonos support of older OS’s seems shorter than makers of other apps seem to maintain.

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amun

I think we disagree about who should think about the consequences of owning a phone with an unsupported OS - it’s owner or Sonos….

Fair enough, but don’t you feel that Sonos should explicitly warn users when they’re about to ‘obsolete’ their phone? Even if they can’t check the version being used, they could still put up a warning before the update, if they’re changing their ‘supported’ criteria.

...though I do feel, as stated earlier, that Sonos support of older OS’s seems shorter than makers of other apps seem to maintain.

‘Considerably shorter’ perhaps? ;-)

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no customer service

Lyricist I

Yes I agree I had a unsupported phone but SONOS said, and they still do, that you can keep using S1 and it will function, just that it will get no updates.

This worked fine until last night when an automatic update came through and stopped the S1 app working with the “updated “ speaker.

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Antifon

Prodigy III

in supporting apps on phones that OS-makers themselves have abandoned.

That’s an emotive description that doesn’t describe the reality.

Google may have stopped “supporting” Android 7 and earlier, but the big difference is that Google hasn’t retrospectively crippled their apps that run under Android 7. So on my “old” Android 7 phone, I can still use Google Chrome, or Gmail, or the Google Play Store or pretty much any other Google-written app and it still works.

Sonos, on the other hand, has deliberately modified their app so that, under Android 7 and earlier it doesn’t work properly. They have crippled the app so that you can’t do things that many people will need to do regularly, such as updating their music library, adding a radio station or updating the network settings if they change their router or their broadband supplier.

You don’t have to think about that for long to realise that there is a big difference between what Google has done and what Sonos has done. The Sonos approach seems, bizarrely, to be designed to annoy its own customers...

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Kumar

Sonos, on the other hand, has deliberately modified their app so that, under Android 7 and earlier it doesn’t work properly. They have crippled the app so that you can’t do things that many people will need to do regularly, such as updating their music library, adding a radio station or updating the network settings if they change their router or their broadband supplier.

Really? I though that the app simply would not load...you are saying that it does but with edited functionality? So someone would have the same version of the app, but with less functionality?

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Antifon

Prodigy III

Yes - it has been deliberately crippled, so that it will load but numerous functions are greyed out.

It’s hard to imagine what Sonos were thinking when they decided to do this. It’s obvious that the end result is that they want to save money by reducing legacy maintenance staff, but the way they have done it doesn’t make any sense from a customer perspective.

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K

Kumar

But on the other hand they could say that this is better than it not loading at all. Some functionality better than none?

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106rallye

Yes I agree I had a unsupported phone but SONOS said, and they still do, that you can keep using S1 and it will function, just that it will get no updates.

This worked fine until last night when an automatic update came through and stopped the S1 app working with the “updated “ speaker.

No, that's not what the (eventually) said. See the first post in this thread:

“After May, systems that include legacy products will continue to work as before - but they will no longer receive software updates or new features.

Sonos will work to maintain the existing experience and conduct bug fixes, (...).”

Maybe a bit confusing as to what consitutes a "software update” or a “bug fix", since all bug fixes bring the need to update the system and also the app. In this last sense S1 wil still receieve updates and it's users wil be confronted by the Sonos policy of keeping up very closely with OS-makers. Maybe unexpected for you, but the S1/S2-split has made no change to this policy. So your products will “continue to work as before” including this policy.

@Antifon @Kumar The first step in stopping support for OS's with Sonos is cutting off the possibility to make certain system changes. The next step is that the app will not update and not contact the system.

@Antifon I'm not an Android user myself, but I have seen people lose functionality or even the complete use of apps because they ran an outdated OS on their iPhone. Whatsapp springs to mind. My wife's iPhone 4s was even kicked off her employer's wifi network a certain time after Apple stopped providing updates.

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Antifon

Prodigy III

But on the other hand they could say that this is better than it not loading at all. Some functionality better than none?

If that was their intention, then they haven’t thought it through properly. They don’t seem to be thinking about the customer experience as being the most important aim. What they have done is to implement a technical solution that repeatedly disappoints the customer.

I can stop and start music, but every time I want to find a new station, or add an album to my library and re-index so that I can play it, or change my network settings, the system tells me I can’t. By design it disappoints the user.

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106rallye

So stopping all support would have been better?

As said, Sonos might be quick in stopping support for older OS’s. But at least they warn you about it, by first taking away functionality.

You might need a new phone soon anyway: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/old-android-phones-lose-many-secure-websites-in-2021-224728196.html

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