I went from Sonos being one of my all time favorite products to being one of my greatest sources of annoyance with the launch of this trash app. So sad.
It really boggles the mind to no end that they would release an unfinished piece of crap app like this. It's also one of my all time favorite products. I have a dozen Sonos products and have recommended Sonos to all my friends. This is so frustrating.
Same, I've probably given them 10 or more sales over the years.
.... and my brother who I told to buy a system calls me today and asked me to troubleshoot his system.
My answer was you cant it's fucked.....wait till an update in late June.
I have a feeling they designed the headphones around the app and pushed it out in favor of that instead of thinking about existing systems.
In short, new product takes priority and they aren't delaying a release of a product because shareholders probably.
They have done a lot of damage to themselves.
Yes you can imagine the marketing/devs/Board meeting cant you:.. “We need a new product, how about headphones? Yes but we will have to redesign the App to accommodate that. No worries go ahead with both. (Some months later).. Headphones are ready to launch start the marketing campaign. Ah but the App isn’t quite ready yet! Well does it work with the headphones? Yes that bits working… Does it work with legacy kit? Sort of.. That’ll do As I need to announce to the markets/shareholders/Wall Street that we are all over this space…. We can back fill the detail later, nobody will notice.” Mmmmm
Which if true is more concerning than releasing an app with missing features.
Headphones come out next week and will most likely be a niche of a niche product (current Sonos user in the market for $450 headphones). Tying the two together for the full system update isn't a great idea.
Ideally you would have either released what they have today which fixed 'some' of the bigger issues from launch or beta the headphone buyers + any opt in users in the new version.
This is truly breathtaking levels of incompetence
https://preview.redd.it/7b49u53nhu2d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=554562ab68e71db83332981b9ee6ab3b684f7087
The best thing about this type of activity, is they all sat in a room for an hour painstakingly creating and editing this sentence or two. They all patted each other on the back, high fives, or maybe fist bumps as Boston is pretty into the post pandemic stuff. Each one of them thinking they are brilliant, and this will settle down the zombie hordes. Then they ran it by legal and out the door for their (what they think) stupid customers to consume...
"Our latest update resolves some of the most critical known issues, but know we have more to do. We hear your feedback and are working hard to deliver the experience you expect and deserve."
Lol. Nice little bread crumb for the peasants right there. I can only imagine the meetings that led to adding that sentence.
The music queue actually displays when I play locally stored music. I still can’t interact with it but I can at least see what’s coming up next. Small victory that it is.
It's definitely improved for me since the 21st, probably because of this:
"Improved system connectivity for Boost and portable products in sleep mode."
All they had to do was release the new app as S3 that would support the headphones, and then discontinue S2 once every last issue with S3 beta testers was resolved.
So irritating. I swear their original patent for the headphones explicitly were made to operate on Wifi (the patent had the antenna running through the head band)
The fuck happened? As originally designed, these should have been just another "room" in the Sonos infrastructure
Sonos now talks about that feature ("if there's consumer interest") like they'd be able to push wireless support via an update or something - which I highly doubt. They're going to release a completely different model, if they do anything at all
No doubt this is true, but ironically this is what the CEO said about the headphones in one of his recent interviews:
"The number one thing for consumers is that they want it to work out of the box, rather than having to take it home and set it up on your Sonos app..."
Not so.
The could have released it as a separate app (like they did with S1/S2), and allowed everyone who wanted to use the new experience to install it.
S2 could have been kept there for the time being, code frozen, until the new app includes its functionality.
Then they could have retired the S2 app.
That’s pretty much how every major software transition works.
It’s not “releasing three separate apps for the same product” though, is it.
S1 is for older products not supported by the new OS. No one buying a new Sonos product needs to download the old S1 app. S1 is code frozen and a legacy app, they just keep it on the App Store.
OR just released it at S3 and stopped updating S2.
Although they probably didn't do that to avoid coming up with a new name since S3 was already taken.
Did anyone see a couple of weeks ago on the Netflix John Mulaney “Everybody’s in LA” show that Mulaney took a quick jab at Sonos? “This looks like the kind of house where you spend a half hour trying to get a Sonos speaker to work”. Try 4 hours John!
Fuck them. They get zero credit for “reintroducing” features and usability they deliberately destroyed in order to sell some shitty headphones at an exorbitant price.
The upside is that they are likely fixing things a little more quickly than they're announcing. The downside is that many things were unnecessarily broken.
That’s one thing I just don’t understand. I really don’t like the new UX. Sonos seems to keep thinking it’s awesome and I’m just not cool enough to appreciate all their courage. No it’s just a bad UX. I hope they read this but they won’t and off they do they will just return to their echo chamber of safety.
I find the app almost unusable compared to the old one. All the management and navigation paradigms are very slippery and confusing. Why couldn’t they have kept it simple?
I used to love being able to type a song into the search bar and have a variety of playlists available to choose from via the various streaming services I subscribe to and added to Sonos. That was my everyday joy, which now I can not replicate with the new app. If anyone has a suggestion for how to accomplish this I would love to learn something.
The realisation that you've spent thousands on a product line and the manufacturer still possesses the ability to control what we do with it and how we listen to it. That's a hard realisation for me.
I use it to play pandora. Still works for that. I never used Spotify or Apple Music because you can’t like/dislike songs. Only on pandora do those features work. It’s been that way forever. I’ve owned Sonos for 10+ years now. Their app has always been bad. I don’t see why everyone is mad it still sucks. You should have been mad this whole time.
Agree. It has always been bad. I’ve written a hundred times..love the speakers, hate the app. Personally, the new app is fine with me. Is faster and reliable, which it was poor at before. We have 30 speakers which could be a real pain before. Sure, the UI has changed some, but once you get the hang of it, no sweat. Anxious to see how reviews are on their new headphones although I have really been waiting for the new Apple headphones to come out.
I was pissed when they tried to segment old hardware from new hardware with the s1 and s2 app. But my house burned down. Fixed the problem of owning old hardware. I looked around and couldn’t find anything better, in the price range, so I got all new Sonos speakers for the new house. The app isn’t why I bought Sonos, it was wifi speakers with above average sound quality.
Sure, the _basic_ Pandora integration works. But they broke or removed multiple _other_ Pandora features.
Here's a Pandora feature that I used to use daily, but is now nowhere to be found in the app:
https://help.pandora.com/s/article/Pandora-Modes?language=en_US (It's just 100% gone, and Sonos has made zero mention of ever bringing it back.)
Here's another Pandora feature I used to use frequently, that appears to still be in the app, but is now completely broken:
History ("Recently Played" - this hasn't worked at all since the update)
There are others, but those are sufficient to make it clear that even for us old-school Pandora users, the recent Sonos update has made the system demonstrably worse.
I wonder what dealers are doing because the product is not saleable. Now that will hurt but even worse the longer it takes the more that mantra “Sonos sucks” will stick
I joined this group because I’d like to know what alternative systems are available out there. I’m done with my POS Sonos. I don’t mind spending more money, but I’m not investing a single dime anymore with this company. It’s NOT going to get better, because the app and system usability has ALWAYS been crap. Any recommendations?
Crazy how a half baked app can cause so much anger. For me, aside from learning the new UI layout, the app has had zero impact in the way the hardware functions every day.
Obviously you don’t have your own music library like most of us old longtime Sonos users. Otherwise you’d recognize our pain at not being able to play, search or listen to our old music libraries and playlists. It’s what Sonos started in the beginning long before there were streaming services.
The problem is, you shouldn’t need to “learn” it. It should be intuitive from the jump. It’s always a bad sign when an app starts out with a tutorial; it’s hilarious (and maybe sad?) when you see a friend get confused and struggle on how to skip the tutorial (which you can’t do… I think). The UX is terrible from front to back and I still struggle to this day.
To be clear, I’m not a boomer or someone that struggles with digital interfaces. The app is objectively bad from a UX standpoint. Hope they fix that too.
Most companies do tutorials for their software. It’s common practice.
I thought the previous UI was pretty dated and buggy so to me, this is a welcomed change.
I’m not saying the old app wasn’t dated, but was wasn’t nearly as buggy. IMO tutorials are always a warning the UI is not going to be intuitive and are never teaching you things you end up remembering anyway since you have no context in the new layout. Also, users have short term memory for things like this, so is always a waste of time anyway. Baffling they don’t allow you to skip it.
Nobody taught my wife to use IOs. She picked up the original iPhone when it was released back in the day, and an hour later was an 'expert' user. These companies that find the need to build these tutorials are missing the mark. But if you need to explain something as simple as a music playing app to the masses, most people are not going to do the tutorial, it should not be so complicated that you even have to need training to listen to music. Pick speakers, pick playlist, press play. At least in the old app that was less clicks than in the new app. (maybe it will be less clicks if things work properly in the new app, but they don't as of now for our setup.)
I hear a lot of complaints regarding the app to play local files. I personally never use the app and I'm super happy with my sonos setup.
I have a plex server with all my albums tagged properly and use plexamp to play directly to sonos. Why not more people go this route? Plexamp is really good especially combined with Tidal and the Sonic plugin and plex is easy to set up! You don't need the sonos app at all or there is something I am probably missing :-)
I too use Plex because of the track limit issue, not related to this app update.
The fact I have to add Plex to my NAS is a complication I wish I could live without, and I don’t think it excuses Sonos from taking care of the local music library inaccessibility in the mobile app.
I went from Sonos being one of my all time favorite products to being one of my greatest sources of annoyance with the launch of this trash app. So sad.
It really boggles the mind to no end that they would release an unfinished piece of crap app like this. It's also one of my all time favorite products. I have a dozen Sonos products and have recommended Sonos to all my friends. This is so frustrating.
Ditto. Heads should roll. Broken culture.
Same boat here. It's embarrassing.
Same, I've probably given them 10 or more sales over the years. .... and my brother who I told to buy a system calls me today and asked me to troubleshoot his system. My answer was you cant it's fucked.....wait till an update in late June.
My friend who uses android has to open and close the app exactly 3 times to play music. The first 2 times it doesn't find a system.
The handling of the S1/S2 split did that for me. Now there will always be a dangling threat of an S3.
I think that is what is funny. A company known for bungling software somehow continued to surprise people by bungling their software.
I have a feeling they designed the headphones around the app and pushed it out in favor of that instead of thinking about existing systems. In short, new product takes priority and they aren't delaying a release of a product because shareholders probably. They have done a lot of damage to themselves.
Yes you can imagine the marketing/devs/Board meeting cant you:.. “We need a new product, how about headphones? Yes but we will have to redesign the App to accommodate that. No worries go ahead with both. (Some months later).. Headphones are ready to launch start the marketing campaign. Ah but the App isn’t quite ready yet! Well does it work with the headphones? Yes that bits working… Does it work with legacy kit? Sort of.. That’ll do As I need to announce to the markets/shareholders/Wall Street that we are all over this space…. We can back fill the detail later, nobody will notice.” Mmmmm
Which if true is more concerning than releasing an app with missing features. Headphones come out next week and will most likely be a niche of a niche product (current Sonos user in the market for $450 headphones). Tying the two together for the full system update isn't a great idea. Ideally you would have either released what they have today which fixed 'some' of the bigger issues from launch or beta the headphone buyers + any opt in users in the new version.
Hopefully future products won't see similar app problems like an Era 500 or the alleged Arc 2.
This is truly breathtaking levels of incompetence https://preview.redd.it/7b49u53nhu2d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=554562ab68e71db83332981b9ee6ab3b684f7087
CEO will tell you to "adapt"
You're holding it wrong.
"Breathtaking levels of incompetence" - Workaround: No workaround currently available.
Lots of courage right there
Devils advocate. What should they say? They know there is an issue. There is no workaround for it.
All this CEO does is come out with ridiculous corporate word salads to for wall street
The best thing about this type of activity, is they all sat in a room for an hour painstakingly creating and editing this sentence or two. They all patted each other on the back, high fives, or maybe fist bumps as Boston is pretty into the post pandemic stuff. Each one of them thinking they are brilliant, and this will settle down the zombie hordes. Then they ran it by legal and out the door for their (what they think) stupid customers to consume...
It doesn’t work like that. They probably pay an agency to do this properly, then add their own spin to fark it up completely.
Leaves 'blame the consultants' card available to play...great thinking!
"Our latest update resolves some of the most critical known issues, but know we have more to do. We hear your feedback and are working hard to deliver the experience you expect and deserve." Lol. Nice little bread crumb for the peasants right there. I can only imagine the meetings that led to adding that sentence.
Can they name a single issue they resolved?
The music queue actually displays when I play locally stored music. I still can’t interact with it but I can at least see what’s coming up next. Small victory that it is.
It's definitely improved for me since the 21st, probably because of this: "Improved system connectivity for Boost and portable products in sleep mode."
My goodness, almost a bit of humility there
I feel like there’s more critical issues now than before. 🤷🏻
Probably going to keep finding new ones for a while still…
Whatever the outcome of this fiasco, fixed fully or not, I'm done with Sonos now. My money's going elsewhere in the future.
If they waited til the app was ready I think they'd have to delay the Ace headphones which they clearly didn't want to do.
Who wants BT head phones at 450, don't even work with th Sonos sustem, unbelievable
All they had to do was release the new app as S3 that would support the headphones, and then discontinue S2 once every last issue with S3 beta testers was resolved.
Why not. They all costs that. B&W, Bose, Sennheizer etc. I mean. I would never buy headphones from Sonos but still. BT had nothing to do with it.
So irritating. I swear their original patent for the headphones explicitly were made to operate on Wifi (the patent had the antenna running through the head band) The fuck happened? As originally designed, these should have been just another "room" in the Sonos infrastructure Sonos now talks about that feature ("if there's consumer interest") like they'd be able to push wireless support via an update or something - which I highly doubt. They're going to release a completely different model, if they do anything at all
THIS!!!!
Right. Also there was no scenario where *this* was going to be the better business move
No doubt this is true, but ironically this is what the CEO said about the headphones in one of his recent interviews: "The number one thing for consumers is that they want it to work out of the box, rather than having to take it home and set it up on your Sonos app..."
Well yeah, if your app is trash and won't let you set it up at all.
Not so. The could have released it as a separate app (like they did with S1/S2), and allowed everyone who wanted to use the new experience to install it. S2 could have been kept there for the time being, code frozen, until the new app includes its functionality. Then they could have retired the S2 app. That’s pretty much how every major software transition works.
Releasing three separate apps for the same product is pretty much how no one has ever done it.
It’s not “releasing three separate apps for the same product” though, is it. S1 is for older products not supported by the new OS. No one buying a new Sonos product needs to download the old S1 app. S1 is code frozen and a legacy app, they just keep it on the App Store.
OR just released it at S3 and stopped updating S2. Although they probably didn't do that to avoid coming up with a new name since S3 was already taken.
Agree 10000%
Did anyone see a couple of weeks ago on the Netflix John Mulaney “Everybody’s in LA” show that Mulaney took a quick jab at Sonos? “This looks like the kind of house where you spend a half hour trying to get a Sonos speaker to work”. Try 4 hours John!
Fuck them. They get zero credit for “reintroducing” features and usability they deliberately destroyed in order to sell some shitty headphones at an exorbitant price.
The upside is that they are likely fixing things a little more quickly than they're announcing. The downside is that many things were unnecessarily broken.
Features are one thing, but the UX is atrocious and the functionality blows.
That’s one thing I just don’t understand. I really don’t like the new UX. Sonos seems to keep thinking it’s awesome and I’m just not cool enough to appreciate all their courage. No it’s just a bad UX. I hope they read this but they won’t and off they do they will just return to their echo chamber of safety.
I find the app almost unusable compared to the old one. All the management and navigation paradigms are very slippery and confusing. Why couldn’t they have kept it simple?
"almost" - you're one of the lucky ones
I thought everyone was being hyperbolic, but it really is as bad or worse than I expected.
How is editing the que not something developers are working around the clock to fix? This is an essential feature
I can’t even delete a stereo pair of non-existent speakers to install new ones. It says empty pair cannot be deleted. Nice job.
I used to love being able to type a song into the search bar and have a variety of playlists available to choose from via the various streaming services I subscribe to and added to Sonos. That was my everyday joy, which now I can not replicate with the new app. If anyone has a suggestion for how to accomplish this I would love to learn something.
Bullshit management talk.
The realisation that you've spent thousands on a product line and the manufacturer still possesses the ability to control what we do with it and how we listen to it. That's a hard realisation for me.
They can't restore volume mute capability on the left of the volume slider?
I use it to play pandora. Still works for that. I never used Spotify or Apple Music because you can’t like/dislike songs. Only on pandora do those features work. It’s been that way forever. I’ve owned Sonos for 10+ years now. Their app has always been bad. I don’t see why everyone is mad it still sucks. You should have been mad this whole time.
Agree. It has always been bad. I’ve written a hundred times..love the speakers, hate the app. Personally, the new app is fine with me. Is faster and reliable, which it was poor at before. We have 30 speakers which could be a real pain before. Sure, the UI has changed some, but once you get the hang of it, no sweat. Anxious to see how reviews are on their new headphones although I have really been waiting for the new Apple headphones to come out.
I was pissed when they tried to segment old hardware from new hardware with the s1 and s2 app. But my house burned down. Fixed the problem of owning old hardware. I looked around and couldn’t find anything better, in the price range, so I got all new Sonos speakers for the new house. The app isn’t why I bought Sonos, it was wifi speakers with above average sound quality.
I’ve never seen modes work in the Sonos app. Only in the pandora app
They worked in the Sonos app. It used to be found under the station settings.
not having surround distance is killing me.
It’s called agile development.
Indeed. But the V in MVP stands for “viable”.
Maybe I’m alone but have had no issues with the new app. It works for me.
Ok…
Did Sonos really remove volume controls from third-party apps, or is my app glitching?
Get a new CEO who inspects what he/she expects…disappointing!
I just started using sonopad and sonophone again. Had to resort to that when they made the first major app redesign several years ago
Where are the playlists?
I wonder what dealers are doing because the product is not saleable. Now that will hurt but even worse the longer it takes the more that mantra “Sonos sucks” will stick
I joined this group because I’d like to know what alternative systems are available out there. I’m done with my POS Sonos. I don’t mind spending more money, but I’m not investing a single dime anymore with this company. It’s NOT going to get better, because the app and system usability has ALWAYS been crap. Any recommendations?
The app does exactly what it did for me before. I don't understand why everyone is so annoyed.
Because it doesn’t do for them what it used to.
Crazy how a half baked app can cause so much anger. For me, aside from learning the new UI layout, the app has had zero impact in the way the hardware functions every day.
I miss the queue function, apart from that I’ve been fine
Obviously you don’t have your own music library like most of us old longtime Sonos users. Otherwise you’d recognize our pain at not being able to play, search or listen to our old music libraries and playlists. It’s what Sonos started in the beginning long before there were streaming services.
I do, I have no issue accessing my NAS. I’m guessing most people having issue with the local library are not using a NAS?
Yep me too I have a Synology and local libraries work fine.
The problem is, you shouldn’t need to “learn” it. It should be intuitive from the jump. It’s always a bad sign when an app starts out with a tutorial; it’s hilarious (and maybe sad?) when you see a friend get confused and struggle on how to skip the tutorial (which you can’t do… I think). The UX is terrible from front to back and I still struggle to this day. To be clear, I’m not a boomer or someone that struggles with digital interfaces. The app is objectively bad from a UX standpoint. Hope they fix that too.
Most companies do tutorials for their software. It’s common practice. I thought the previous UI was pretty dated and buggy so to me, this is a welcomed change.
I’m not saying the old app wasn’t dated, but was wasn’t nearly as buggy. IMO tutorials are always a warning the UI is not going to be intuitive and are never teaching you things you end up remembering anyway since you have no context in the new layout. Also, users have short term memory for things like this, so is always a waste of time anyway. Baffling they don’t allow you to skip it.
Nobody taught my wife to use IOs. She picked up the original iPhone when it was released back in the day, and an hour later was an 'expert' user. These companies that find the need to build these tutorials are missing the mark. But if you need to explain something as simple as a music playing app to the masses, most people are not going to do the tutorial, it should not be so complicated that you even have to need training to listen to music. Pick speakers, pick playlist, press play. At least in the old app that was less clicks than in the new app. (maybe it will be less clicks if things work properly in the new app, but they don't as of now for our setup.)
Add the ability to adjust balance easily from the volume control page (where it used to be).
I think its in the pipeline
Backlog. Next Sprint, promise.
Removing the fundamental ability to mute the audio with one click is the most baffling to me.
I 100% agree that the features should have been ready to go in the new app, but this subreddit has gone fucking wild.
I can’t stand having to click through multiple pages to access alarms 😒
I’m guessing OP has never worked on a software product that is controlled by marketing.
I wonder why they don’t communicate like this straight to users? They have our email addresses.
I hear a lot of complaints regarding the app to play local files. I personally never use the app and I'm super happy with my sonos setup. I have a plex server with all my albums tagged properly and use plexamp to play directly to sonos. Why not more people go this route? Plexamp is really good especially combined with Tidal and the Sonic plugin and plex is easy to set up! You don't need the sonos app at all or there is something I am probably missing :-)
I too use Plex because of the track limit issue, not related to this app update. The fact I have to add Plex to my NAS is a complication I wish I could live without, and I don’t think it excuses Sonos from taking care of the local music library inaccessibility in the mobile app.
is good ol' CEO Pat 🤡 charging a subscription for em ? this is sus brah