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SONOS - Once again you've shot yourself in the foot

I am at a total loss as to why the Sonos app is now worse than ever.

I have 3x Play 5's, 2x Play 1's, a Playbar, an Amp and a Sub worth thousands of ££££ and now none of them will work or allow me to successfully set them up. Why??? This app is garbage. I hate the new look too. You say you’re preparing it for the future but watch out, you may not have one of you alienate your customer base, again. 

You made my earlier devices obsolete a few years ago and I thought I’ll stick with you, and so I had to replace them all And now this again. I called support to be told I’d have a 35-minute wait. Never again. I’m going back to the old-school wired system. 

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

15 replies

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @websterpa 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! And, apologies for the delay.

Sorry to hear of the issues you are having with your Sonos system! Looking at your system now, most of your speakers are offline - this means that whatever is going wrong for you, it is not the Sonos app (unless you unplugged them from power because you were having issues, of course) at fault.

Assuming all your speakers have solid white lights (unless you’ve set the lights to turn off), I would recommend a reboot of your router - please switch it off for at least 30 seconds before switching back in, and allow several minutes for it to boot up and provide WiFi again.

If this does not help, rebooting the speakers by unplugging hem from power for a moment may help.

Finally, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

I hope this helps.

 

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
A

Corry P, you are most certainly kidding. Every user knows that the new app *doesn't work at all*.

Infinite lag, system not found half the tries, tracks which don't get on the list, impossibility to modify the list, impossibility to change the volume, impossibility to add a whole list from Deezer (like “favourite songs”), etc. You must be living on another planet but very soon Sonos will stop selling any appliance, and you will lose your job. Unless you return to the old app and release the new one only when it works (but it is so slow, I don't believe it can) and offers at least the same features as the previous version.

jgatie

As my dear father used to say, you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals and support persons.   Actually, his exact words were “Do you know why people sh*t all over service people?  Because they know they can’t fight back.”

W
Userlevel 2

Hi @websterpa 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! And, apologies for the delay.

Sorry to hear of the issues you are having with your Sonos system! Looking at your system now, most of your speakers are offline - this means that whatever is going wrong for you, it is not the Sonos app (unless you unplugged them from power because you were having issues, of course) at fault.

Assuming all your speakers have solid white lights (unless you’ve set the lights to turn off), I would recommend a reboot of your router - please switch it off for at least 30 seconds before switching back in, and allow several minutes for it to boot up and provide WiFi again.

If this does not help, rebooting the speakers by unplugging hem from power for a moment may help.

Finally, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

I hope this helps.

 

 

Thank you for your reply, it is appreciated.  You guessed correctly. All speakers are offline as I unplugged them from the power. I thought to bring just one device online and operational before introducing the others one at a time. As this strategy still didn’t work, I thought to change the wi-fi network they connect to, to our guest network and only have Sonos speakers on it, unless a guest connects too. As this didn’t work either, I gave up and they all remain offline as I prepare to go on my holiday. I thought to address this again when I get back, feeling refreshed and looking for a new challenge :)

 

I would ask if your techs have access to tools that could help, why don’t Sonos release them to users so they can help themselves?

jgatie

 

 

I would ask if your techs have access to tools that could help, why don’t Sonos release them to users so they can help themselves?

 

There was a time when users were able to access the diagnostic tools.  However, a few idiots left their networks wide open to the internet and the hacks which followed made big headlines at click bait based websites.  So Sonos decided to close them off. 

A

Jgatie, my tone was probably not nice but I was certainly not intending that one should be happy that Sonos might be at risk and that its workers might lose their job because maybe some marketing people pushed to release an app which is far from ready. On the contrary, I find it very sad, and especially for the people who are trying to help and might still suffer from that decision. But it is quite likely that all support staff knows that the app is not working at all (I suppose they tried it?)  and it would be simpler to acknowledge this rather than hiding it and try to make a decent list of all issues and ask the developers if they simply can be solved (yet the app is so slow there must be some misconception from the start and it is not even clear it can be repaired). As for me I just reverted today to Sonos 16 from March 12th after 2 months without a system and things are much better now. Sorry for the tone.

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @websterpa 

Your Sonos system will not work with a guest network - the very nature of a guest WiFi network is that devices on it are deliberately prevented from communicating with each other, which prevents your Sonos system from operating as it should.

There will be an update to the app very soon - I recommend you enjoy your holiday and not worry to much about it all. Update when you get home, and if you continue to have issues, I will do what I can to help.

The tool I was looking at connects directly to our cloud servers and is not - and will never be - available to our customers. It provides too much information about any system.

The Web App, however, may well help you determine if your speakers are connected to our cloud - you can use it at https://play.sonos.com.

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @Antonin 

Ok, so you turn on a speaker and it connects to WiFi. It then contacts our server, and I am able to see that the speaker is online. Great. And, if something doesn’t work in the app, it is likely the app at fault. Especially now - I am not under any illusions.

Alternatively, you could turn on a speaker and it does not connect to WiFi, and does not connect to our server, and when I look it up, I am told the speaker is offline - what part of that, exactly, involves an issue with the new Sonos app? I really am curious. 

I understand that you are not happy with the current sate of affairs, but I really don’t see that as an excuse to sabotage someone else’s attempt at getting help. As it turns out, the speakers were unplugged as a result of their behaviour, which was in turn due to the new app, but that is not a thing that either of us knew at that point. Questions result in answers, and they result in solutions. To assume answers is to get nowhere.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
A

@Corry P , thanks for the remark. Maybe you’re right. And certainly I should have understood from the beginning that Websterpa had maybe a specific problem and not one related to the app, despite the title and first sentences. Be careful though that maybe it is related to the app as well… Actually, I had a similar issue, a few weeks ago, after many minutes of despair while my system was not seen by the new app. I thought “maybe it has really got offline and I should try to reconfigure it”, so I turned on the bluetooth and tried to reinstall one of my two Play:1 speakers. And the new app did not find it. Instead, it was finding some Era 300 (which I don’t have), but then I preferred to stop before potentially ruining my system by installing a wrong configuration. So it could well be that Websterpa’s configuration issues are also all related to the new app. But sorry to interfere. I arrived on this thread by trying to understand if anyone had any tricks to get the app work, and trying some related keywords… Actually there should be a place were users can make the list of everything which is not working with the new app, and every oddity they observed. (If there is, let me know where.) Maybe it would get very long, but they are all issues to solve. (I still wonder if they can, as I find very puzzling the huge lag after each command, which gives the impression that from the start there is an issue with the way the app is conceived. But one needs to try.) And I still believe that making all clients of such a (good) system “beta-testers” is a very risky policy.

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @Antonin 

I agree with all your points. And, as it turns out, the OP of this thread was having issues with the new app.

As a technical support agent, I learned fairly quickly to take reports from customers with a wee pinch of salt. Direct evidence is more reliable than what I suppose could be called a witness statement - something the police have known for a while. Witness statements must not be ignored, of course, but they can’t overrule evidence. At my time of replying, all the evidence was saying that the issue was with the speakers being offline. We now know more. I don’t expect everyone to instinctively know and understand the details of being a technician, of course.

My assumption with the Era 300 showing up would be that a neighbour of yours happened to have an Era 300 in setup mode when you happened to open the app. As a result, I have to also assume that if you look now, you likely will not see it again. The only other explanation would be that the app misidentified the speaker, which would be a significant issue - please let me know if you suspect this is the case.

There is a thread somewhere that a community member compiled a list of known issues into, but I can’t find it with a quick search. I’ll keep an eye out for it and post a link here if I see it.

I hope this helps.

 

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
A

Dear Corry P.: I haven’t replied because I was happily using the old Sonos 16 which was working very well. Today Sonos achieved commiting suicide, by disabling that version, which is now stuck and forces you to upgrade. So I had to upgrade. Then the new application was telling me I had no system. Then I tried as before to configure a new one, and this time, no Play:1, no Era 300, nothing was found at all. Fortunately after a while the old system was detected. So I’m sorry I cannot tell you more… I’m quite sure my neighbours below and above do not have a Sonos system, since the neighbour below does not and the apartment above is temporarily empty. Now I’m currently listening with new app, which means, I just could put 2 songs on the list (with an error message, but then it still worked), and then my telephone went in sleep mode, and when I wake it up the app does not find my system any longer (after a few minutes it comes back). I think it is now time to unlock and revert to Sonos 16 and let everyone use it.

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @Antonin 

Sorry to hear of the additional issues you’ve had. If using an old version of the controller, and you update the firmware of the speakers, it is expected that at some point they will no longer work together. This is not a thing that happened vindictively - it’s just how things work. We did nothing specific to disable older versions of the app - it just happens. If anyone is using the older app, they should disable Automatic updates for the system.

Please keep in mind that the app is not omniscient - it only knows what it’s told by the system. If it cannot find your system, it cannot say anything about the state of your system accurately. Therefore, please don’t believe the app when you know that your system should be in the same state as when you left it.

Once a day or two, I get a report of no system found in my app too - I just force-close the Sonos app, reopen it and get connected - it takes my about 3 seconds, if that. Please try it the next time the app reports that it doesn’t find your system:

How to force quit an app on iPhone, iPad:

  1. Swipe up from the bottom of the device. If your device has a home button, double press that instead.
  2. This will bring up a carousel of all the open windows on your device.
  3. Swipe the app you want to close. It will disappear from the carousel.
  4. Reopen the app.

How to force quit an app on Android:

  1. Open the Settings app on the Android device.
  2. Scroll the list and tap Apps, Applications or Manage apps.
  3. Scroll the list to find the app to force quit.
  4. Tap FORCE STOP.
  5. OR (optional) On certain devices like Samsung, tap Application Manager (the button to the left of the Home button), then swipe Sonos app up and off screen

I hope this helps.

 

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
A

Thanks! I did this already :) (and it works most of the time, even if it takes some time until the devices are found).

The app seems slightly improved since last week (or maybe my devices were updated and communicate better with the app?). I have no way to know whether the devices’ firmware is new or not (I thought this information was available somewhere, but I can’t find it any longer), maybe they were updated, that’s correct (and unfortunate :).

Beyond the bugs, there is still a major issue in the ergonomy: when you load a title from the list of “top songs” of some artist on Deezer, it just loads this title (which is something normally available from the menus on the right “...”), and not the whole list of subsequent titles (which is *not* available from any menu).

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @Antonin 

There was a firmware update for speakers just the other day. If you installed it, you will see Version:80.1-55014 under each product in the About your System section (Settings icon » Manage » About your System). A new version of the app was supposed to come out with it, but issues were spotted just before release and it was delayed till Monday next week.

We are aware of the Deezer issue and have informed them of it.

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
A

A new version of the app was supposed to come out with it, but issues were spotted just before release and it was delayed till Monday next week.


Oh, I guess I can stop checking the App Store every 10 minutes, then.   I was hoping for today, and it’s been a slow day in the office.   Really slow … !!!!  😋😋😋

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