I mean, he’s not wrong that the app wasn’t ready. Which begs the question why they didn’t un-roll-it-out. >.>
As someone in the market for a new sound system - looking for recommendations for something wireless w/ Dolby Atmos. Any suggestions?
You might check out wiim stuff. They seem to be the darling of budget streaming for the moment.
I didn’t even know the app was updated before this post. I only start it when I add new devices, which is never.
Sonos. Recent app troubles aside (it’s really not that bad, just kind of clunky for certain tasks), the longevity alone make them so worth it. Despite being essentially computers/smart home devices, they support 10+ year old devices in their latest app, older devices in their S1 Controller app, and the sound quality & setup ease is amazing.
Plus, they have pretty good Black Friday sales and make it easy to build piece by piece if pricing is too high. You can also used replaced pieces to build a sound system in another room.
Over ~3 years I started with a Beam, then bought a Sub and two Play:1s as rears. Bought an Arc, moved the Beam to the bedroom. Just recently I bought 2 Arc 300s as rears/upward firing Atmos speakers, and moved the Play:1s to the bedroom. Resale value stays high so if you have no use for a piece, you can sell it and get 50%-75% of what you paid out of it easily.
There are cheaper devices with better sound quality out there, but nobody else can compete on the whole package with Sonos.
This is what happens when a digital rewrite is on the critical path of a physical product.
Physical product development is a behemoth. Manufacturing, certification, marketing, shipping, warehousing, contracts with retailers, etc. all add up to mean that, past a certain point in the project, the product is gonna launch whether the digital side is ready or not.
If the C-level/VP-level folks aren’t willing to tailor the product roadmap to allow for a safe rewrite effort, you’re pretty much guaranteed this outcome.
(Options are either keep the new product on the back burner until after the rewrite settles, or launch the product without IoT support at first. But you gotta plan for these up-front so you don’t mess up your product’s legal claims.)
I’m lucky that I only have Gen1 products. I kept getting hit with “well don’t you want new features?” And I’m thinking to myself “what features?” This does everything I want. Plays local music, integrates with streaming services, syncs between multiple devices throughout the house.
And it’s a good thing I can’t upgrade after seeing this whole mess.
Wait they made an even worse one?
Yep. It’s impressive, tbh.
It’s a company that was one of the first to get into “smart xyz” at all, scored big, and since then has shown that they have absolutely not a single clue how to do smart home appliances.
It’s easier for me to control my Sonos devices through Home Assistant and dashboards I’ve created, rather than using the Sonos app itself. It’s like they hired some McKinsey consultants to make the app as useless as it can be.
I hate it, and I play music on my tiny Home Mini more often, just to avoid the app.
IoT gonna IoT
Too little, too late. For first month the app was unusable. It took forever to play the music and when it finally got played the missing features made the experience at best mediocre
I’m not going to stick with Sonos. I have already started lookingfosr a replacement. Audio Pro looks pretty good.
Same. For me the final straw was when it started desynchronising from actual progress when playing podcasts, which means every time I pause and resume I’m somewhere else I the episode.
10$ food coupons when?
Pffft food coupons. It’s $5 off the purchase of your next device within 15 days of issue.
Why can’t they just fix the simple bug of having to open the app ,close it down, then reopen it just to connect to your setup? A simple ‘wait’ line of code would do wonders.
Crowdstrike CEO: Did it crash the phone?
Here’s a $10 Ubereats coupon.
I thought I lost my Sonos integration with my music source. In fact it was just an update to the app and I don’t know how to navigate that… or maybe the new app just removed the integration
Such a courageous move.
Every Sonos app sucks. It’s just one of those facts of life.
Whoever the fuck thought a massive regression for every single customer was the perfect thing to deploy with no option for rollback needs to stop working in software.
This isn’t a software problem. It’s a capitalism problem.
But there’s no future profit for Sonos in them providing the ability for us to play music we already own from our own library.
Sorry. I forgot human civilization is structured around what is profitable for the individual for a fraction of a lifetime, instead of what optimizes the quality of life, usage of resources, and long term survivability of our species for millennia. My bad.
If you release it on a stable channel, if you advertise it as a feature of a device, you support it for the life of the device.
And when support ends you must provide everything necessary for users to have absolute control over the hardware themselves. “Unsupported so it’s trash” is nonsense.
Once you stop supporting the hardware or software, you are required to open source everything required for consumers — as well as any competitor — to pickup where you left off and continue development.
Does this not cover that??
You can open source everything and it doesn’t matter if you don’t provide the keys to unlock it.
You’re going to have to proactively provide tools for users to unlock their devices completely.
(Photo of IoT dev living in your proposed world, colorized 2024)
Except companies would be more careful about what they develop, more focused with their resources, and restructure their hardware and software to be easily open sourced without leaking legitimately-proprietary IP — instead of closed sourcing everything because it’s easy, vendor lock-in, planned obsolescence, and fuck-you-pay-me!
Obviously all of this depends on whether you have a government by the people, for the people, instead of a corporate oligarchy masquerading as a democracy… So we’re all fucked and I’m daydreaming in some star trek fantasy socialist utopia!
I appreciate the notion, but I fear it would probably just result in management saying “just NERD HARDER”. The flip side of being more careful and focused is being less flexible. Not gonna replace that ancient foundational framework that was deprecated in 2015 if it risks legal liability.
You don’t even need demand eternal support. Just say that if manufacturers want their product to expire like milk, then they can damn well print an expiry date on the package, too.
How would "“Will cease functioning on <x>” affect consumer purchasing decisions?
There was an unofficial option for rollback - I’m on Android so I went to apkmirror and downloaded the last good version and turned off auto update. This worked for a while, but then they forced me to update - it literally said I had to update to continue using. I’ve seen someone say this wasn’t actually a forced update, but rather keeping all the parts of your network in sync. I have one Sonos device and my phone is the only things that connects to it??
And that is why we don’t buy things that depend on proprietary apps and/or cloud connectivity. Can’t break my shit if it’s local only.
Did you also disable FW updates on the hardware? I’m still running the old version because they nuked Subsonic support. There’s a banner at the top remind me there’s an update, but it’s not forcing anything.
It’s not that simple. They sold new hardware that claimed app support, and the app support was only in the new codebase.
Ship a new app then. Sonos already do this for older products.
Having been in this position, I’m sure having two apps is hell for them and increasingly complicated the more the features and back-end services overlap. And there would probably have been drastically more overlap between v2 and v3 than v1 and v2.
Ultimately, you just wanna be on one codebase.
I’m not saying this is a good or okay move by Sonos as a company to their consumers. But the die was cast when the product roadmap was established, and the short-sighted technical solutions people are throwing out in the comments are far worse options for the company (and consumers, in the long run) than just accepting the current problem and moving on.
I’m in leadership at a place where we ship software to hundreds of millions of devices every other week and sure, it sucks to maintain legacy products, but you never sunset something without one hell of a grace period and plenty of warning. And not without feature parity if you’re rewriting to escape tech debt.
There isn’t a valid excuse. They brought this upon themselves and their users knowingly and if they did it without knowing the consequences, that’s even more alarming.
Audio is one of the easiest if not THE easiest to do wirelessly. Why ANYONE would use this proprietary bullshit is beyond me. I’m looking at my girlfriends Sonos that we never use anymore once I put a shitty sound-bar on the theater TV which sounds better, and we can chromecast anything we want to it or just flip to the HTPC and use it like a computer.
Eat billionaires. Fuck corporations. Open. Source. Everything!
Isn’t Chromecast proprietary though?
Sonos’s protocol is also same; if people want to develop on their platform using the protocol it is documented and there are open source solutions:
Looks like Google cast is the protocol and it’s proprietary, while they offer a SDK, it does not appear to be open source. There is an open source alternative though. https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast/
So… Yes?
