Totally Frutsrated after 20 years of Loyalty

Rosswells - I share your frustration.  I just recently upgraded at a cost of some £3k to all new kit because of the S2 issue.  It took about 3 days to get only 12 units up and running (with a couple taking three weeks) and not one (mostly new) worked first time!  Not ONE!!!  I am a tech and have a modern, fast and robust hard wired network throughout our house.  The Era 300s were the worst - took 2 days of trying to get them as a stereo pair.

And issues I have with the new S2:

Very flaky and poor UX setup for ALL devices (Port, Era etc).  Sometimes it just cycles through a load of setup questions many times.

No search on music libraries, no alphabet scroll (can’t go to a letter), and a list but no tile view - I have many thousand albums and it takes like 100 swipes to get to anywhere so I have just given up - it makes using your music library impossible (unless you just listen to albums or artists starting with A!).

No playlists!  What the ...???  Can only add to queue, replace queue or play now …

No fixed volume out any more (I have high end amps on a lot of this).

Music library goes missing (need to restart the app).

Sometimes doesn’t find the Sonos system (needs to close, kill the app and re-open)

Volume control is flaky, I have many devices and before you find the room the panel closes and the volume seems to have a mind of its own sometimes!

The UI is nowhere near as nice as the S1 was, it’s messy and not as intuitive as S1 was, for example you can’t hide recently played (I don’t play stuff again and again but can’t hide it), you can’t get rid of Sonos favourites (who cares what Sonos promotes?), you can’t get rid of Sonos radio and so on.  Ads appear for new kit (like I’m going to buy any more!).

No tablet view, this is built for phone only and not tablet (unlike S1).

Updating older (but compatible) kit e.g. a Port took a whole two weeks - about 20 tries and just constantly “hung” - I think they did a release that fixed this one.

Grouping rooms is hit and miss - depending on which room you start with it often doesn’t work (“something went wrong” … er like tell me what??)

UK support is appalling - spent over an hour on chat to be told “oh that doesn’t behave as expected (I know, that’s why I called!), please call support on your phone” - then went on a call - wait list was over an hour and gave up in the end.

The desktop app has hardly any functionality.

How can a company with so much cash and resource release such an untested and poorly designed app?  They stated it was a ground up new build - I get that sometimes you need to do that - but if this is the quality for a new build I have no confidence that any updates will fix anything.  What is the CTO doing (who is the CTO?).

In summary I think this was aimed at shareholders as I imagine a big bonus goes to the C-suite if they hit the headphone release - at the expense of users.  The CEO was ex-Blackberry which might explain it!

As I say - I am a tech and an entrepreneur and have run several (successful) software companies over the years and that success wasn’t down to me but how we looked after our customers and cared about our products.

@The Alster 
Well said! Just in case it helps, if you are on IOS then SonoPhone and SonoPad both support Sonos Music Libraries a whole lot better than the new Sonos app, they also including alphabetic scroll (position to a letter for artists and albums). This may tide you over until(?) Sonos add the missing functionality back to their new app.
You can also easily drag/drop room over each other to group them.
Hope this helps,
Ross.

I’m also very frustrated with Sonos and their poor Q&A testing before releasing any new app or changes! My network router and WiFi is working perfectly, and after multiple reboots and resets to the speakers with over 5+ hours to get everything working finally - only resulted in the system loosing all configuration settings a few days later. Who on earth is running software engineering? They should be fired immediately… this is not the way to treat customers and loyal users. WTF is the leadership thinking? Perhaps, a class action lawsuit is in order to hold the executives and business accountable. Enough of the BS Sonos! We can’t even get your bot or technical support to resolve the issues with the application, you’ve created a mess and very frustrated community. Shift the application back immediately to save yourselves!