WHY I am NOT dumping Sonos

All good points, with a different approach to address item 5 for new buying:

For the next buy do not buy any product that bundles the app+smart bits along with the expensive to build sound reproduction electronics and speaker drivers and other components. Bundling means that you end up having to replace the whole bundle when the front end throws a hissy fit as seems inevitable with it, being as software driven as it is. That event makes audio hardware in good working condition go to a landfill, just to accommodate a change in the smart stuff at the front end.

Yes, but most seem to want boxed plug'n'play alternatives, eg. Bluesound, Bose, Denon, naim, etc.  Most of these have only Spotify, Tidal, none have podcasts or audiobooks.  As for radio, they all just offer one aggregator. Sonos has a good spread of radio services. 

Even in a situation like the one with Sonos just now, many users have to wait for Sonos to fix their broken systems for as long as Sonos will take to do so, because of the considerable investment in the hardware.

The other advantage of unbundling is that it allows users to get better sound that what Sonos offers, excellent though that is. And, if desired, spend more to get it knowing that the service life of that part of their kit can be in decades.

As an example, if I was looking at something like WiiM, I would look to get the one without amplification and wire it to a quality third party amp or active/powered speakers.

If you must have everything in the Sonos stable, then you must also deal with times like these with some equanimity!

That's something in short supply these days, I'm afraid. 😎

I noticed!

I think that there are very few users here planning to dump Sonos. The app is bad but given the investment people have very few will be able to afford dumping Sonos at this point.

The majority here are indicating that they will not be investing in future speaker upgrades and will decide on what platform to use later.

Inevitably the app will be fixed and that will play a role in determining how many people leave Sonos in the future. The longer we carry on like this the bigger the future impact will be.

Quite: you are accurately describing me in 2020 in the quoted bits above. All 12 of my Sonos units are still in use, but I do not use the Sonos app. Where I do, I use the S1 app for music from my local NAS. What I did in 2020, by getting off the Sonos apps bandwagon, is paying off for me just now.

The other consideration is that as I don't use alarms and no longer have a music library, preferring to stream. The negative aspects of the App haven't caused me much disruption.  Sonos market research indicates that 80% of their user base are in the same category.

I'm not diminishing the impact on users that do use music libraries,etc but personally my only impact is that the app is different, rather than missing functionality that I personally consider critical. 

I still consider Sonos to be the best multi room sound system available for the price and, again personally, I trust Sonos to fix the issues with the App in a fairly short time scale.

In addition, I suspect that the new app has been created to support an extension of the product range, possibly requiring different functionality and app architecture.

I too still rate Sonos.

I agree they will fix the app just think it will take longer than they expect because there seem  to be more bugs and issues than they were either prepared to admit or expected.

Fixing code while adding missing feature is never easy for the developers who will be under a lot of pressure because of poor management decisions.