It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
Even Apple has never been that bad. They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
People will think what you’re saying is hyperbole; however, I was on a walk with the family, and I saw a Sonos speaker in the trash. It looked like new and a fairly recent model. I lugged it home, and it was a $US500 Sonos Play:5 speaker system [1].
Once home, I plugged it in, and it powered up.
I tried to pair it with my iPhone using the new Sonos app, and it didn’t work (the app never found the speaker).
I then tried the same again using my development Android device, and it instantly worked!
Once it was set up with the Android app, I could access it via the iPhone version of the app.
I can only imagine some iPhone owner literally threw it in the trash because he couldn’t get the iOS app to work. Bonkers…
They (Sonos) basically willfully attempted to brick their consumer devices, and since many sonos customers were prosumer enthusiasts but not technical (hw or sw) it really did signal EOL for the products. Bananas. I still have a my Play1/3/5 infrastructure operating through Home Assistant and AirBridge that turns them into Airplay devices. It's not perfect but still gives them utility. Considering how much they f'n cost..
I have some old Sonos speakers that have been gathering dust for a while.
I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.
However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.
And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.
Be thankful Sonos no longer have 'recycle mode' - an antifeature which gave customers a discount in exchange for permanently bricking their old Sonos hardware. They were forced to discontinue the practice after backlash.
Funnily enough I bought a Sub Mini last year and had to borrow an iPad to add it to my system because it failed on Android, even when being walked through the process by someone from Sonos support.
Well that is basically the model of the home stereo today.
People don’t realize sound was solved decades ago. How they could get the same stereo their grandfather could have ordered from the sears catalog and some cabinets from that sears catalog and that would be better sound than they are capable of ever perceiving, and how it would last them their entire life on that one stereo and probably the lives of multiple generations of family members. With IO that has always been a standard and always will be a standard. And a stereo like this isn’t even terribly expensive. A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
Instead they are sold soundbars and other crap tiny speakers that are not built to last, and might use specific io to connect over open standards that have been around for decades. They end up spending quite a lot more money for a shit experience that they are none the wiser that there are even alternatives to, without becoming audiophiles themselves consuming hundreds of pages of relevant media in that niche.
I've been dabbling in Hifi for most of my life, a hobby inherited from my father. I have some awareness of consumer Hifi over the last 50 years.
Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago, partially because of better engineering and mostly because of advances in electronics. An entry level receiver today would wipe the floor with consumer level equipment from the 80s.
Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks. The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
It is ironic because traditional Hifi is in an amazing place in terms of value. I recently bought a budget (<$300) setup for my PC and I'm blown away by what a couple of modest bookshelf speakers, a modern mini-amp and a compact subwoofer can accomplish.
Well one of those options lets me click a button on the phone in my pocket and play music across multiple rooms without running any wires between rooms. And similarly supports surround-sound audio without running wires around or inside walls.
I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
It feels like one of those low-sci-fi settings where we thought it'd be funny and quaint to have post-collapse scavengers endlessly repairing retro tech, but now it's actually happening and it's not funny anymore.
Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.
My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.
Yep, and this kind of needlessly wasteful consumerism is everywhere in the tech industry. All of the token statements about sustainability that come from the same industry that normalized and celebrates this kind of product strategy drives me a little crazy sometimes.
> A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
I have a rather nice NAD amplifier that I bought about 29 years ago. It had to be repaired once at about the 6 year mark. Recently, it has developed a new electronic failure mode that I don't believe can be repaired.
So ... yes, but let's not overdo the "never have to make another home audio purchase" part ...
Still enjoy my Elac speakers from 20+ years ago at an analog amp, a class D amp wouldn‘t be bad, though. For smaller speakers at computers I like active nearfield monitors and a good interface like Focusrite. Can recommend Genelec speakers, for example.
I had a fancy separate stereo system with a HDMI switcher in the AV amp, well reviewed speakers I bought from a hi-fi enthusiast friend and all that.
It was a massive pain to put out all the cables, adjust the system manually little by little (the setup mic kinda helped, but wasn't that good).
Then I got a Sonos Beam and that set of "crap tiny speakers" with a fancy DSP brought so much more dimension to movies that it wasn't even funny. Upgraded to a Sub and it automatically offloaded those frequencies to it and the Beam got even better now that it didn't have to cosplay a subwoofer.
For setup all I had to do was walk around the space and wave my phone around and the difference was clearly audible even to my non-discerning ears.
Later I upgraded to an Arc + got two rears and everything got a lot better.
The v2 app is utter crap, I haven't had to use it for anything else than Trueplay adjustment when we moved a while ago. The v1 let me debug what the soundbar was receiving (my TV was sending data in the wrong format and I was just getting fancy stereo instead of Dolby Atmos). V2 doesn't have any power user features at all.
I'm not going back to a wired setup with a separate amp unless I get a dedicated theater room I can sound proof and manage the acoustics. I _am_ considering switching to a brand that doesn't need an app to setup, but it's slim pickings in the upper tier of soundbars.
Sound might be solved, but multi-room audio is not. On major renovations you could layout speaker cables, but then you can't adjust positions.
Custom solutions with, like, snapcast and raspberries (like mine), works and you don't need to deal with any of this, but then you need to deal with software setup annoyances. It get's technical.
Nailed it. You don’t even have to buy new stuff now.
Still rocking my early 90s system. Has required a couple of amp repairs (capacitors and sticky relay) but no big issue. Bought a Bluetooth DAC for streaming stuff. Job done.
Except the industry is nearly dead. Almost nobody is buying legitimate stereo systems anymore, and the ones that are out there (at almost any price) are mind-bogglingly incompetent. I'm shocked that Sonos is even a going concern at this point, although I suppose it is because of what I relate below.
The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
A few years ago my Denon A/V receiver crapped out and I decided to go "upmarket" and get an NAD T758. I accept a bit of quirkiness from a smaller name, but "quirkiness" doesn't come close to describing the design and functionality defects that plagued this thing. Everything from baffling menu navigation (not kidding: Pressing Enter did not select a menu entry; you were supposed to use an arrow key) to the fact that it would only pass 720p video because it reported erroneous EDID info to HDMI devices. It didn't pass the info from the connected display device; it just provided its own EDID blob to everything, which reported a max resolution of 720p.
The NAD also featured Dirac processing, which I shelled out for to get the full license and spent hours with a test mic profiling my room and speakers. Then... it would just lose the entire configuration. Deleted off the receiver. "We haven't been able to figure out why this happens," said NAD. In fact, in several years they never fixed a single one of the crippling defects I encountered and reported.
But NAD isn't the only shitshow in town. Let me address the biggest impediment to whole-home audio (or even multi-zone audio): manufacturers' bizarre conceit that anyone can use secondary zones that only play ANALOG sources. The NAD was crippled by this stupidity, as is the top-of-the-line Pioneer I bought to replace it.
In the case of the NAD, I addressed this defect by running RCA cables across the back of the receiver, from its preamp outputs to a CD-player input; and assigning that input to Zone 2. Why the hell didn't NAD just do that internally with a switch?
On the Pioneer, it's actually worse. There ARE no preamp outputs. It has THREE zones, one of which I can tie to the main one but the third, yep, can only play analog sources.
All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
BTW, I did build a patch bay with switches, to wire the secondary zone in parallel with the first... but this overloaded one pair of amps in the NAD and destroyed the entire receiver. Yep: NAD doesn't have a simple overload breaker. They just burn the entire amplifier board up; that's the breaker. Unfuckingbelievable.
But back to the main issue: Who is seriously going to dick around trying to select sources and adjust volume to each zone (with what, by the way, an app?) on one receiver instead of simply buying a bookshelf system for every remote room you want to play music in? I sure as shit wouldn't, and I'm the kind of person who ran digital cables under my house to an equipment closet so I could have a proper surround setup in my living room. I have a projector and home-built screen, but even I would never bother with the stupid usage scenario Pioneer, NAD, and the two other makers envision:
This scenario revolves around nonexistent people who are going to put on a RECORD or TAPE, then go to the other side of their house or down to their rec room for half an hour... and then come running back to the other side of the house to flip the record or tape over. WTF.
It boggles my mind that I'm not able to download the oldest released version of software that was compatible with my old version of iOS.
My iPad is too old to upgrade to the new OS, but yet no software is available for it in the store, because all new apps are encouraged to be re-released for the newest version of the OS.
My device is completely frozen in time from whatever software was installed on it when it went out of support.
Why is apple always brought up even though they have nothing to do with the topic on hand, and speakers and iphones/laptops are obviously quite different products?
Usually yeah. Though it sure appears that a lot of apps requiring a recent iOS lately don't need too. It's curious where that push is coming from, if they're all individual company choices, made at once, for the first time ever.
I have two Play 5's that I have had for a decade and they're still currently set up working completely fine on an Apple device. That's a speaker that was released 16 years ago and still works through the Sonos app, still allows me to play Spotify, still works natively with the Playbar to watch movies and TV.
That sounds pretty good to me. If people want to throw out their hardware and buy new that's fine, but they haven't needed to throw out their Play 5's.
If I was still using an Apple iPhone from 2009 you can bet it would be a terrible experience
There was a time when Sonos really tried to EOL "Gen 1" devices, including the Play 5. There was such a backlash that they backpedaled a bit, but Gen 1 devices lost the ability to interact with Gen 2 and later devices and you need to use a different app for them.
2 out of 3 of my Sonos devices were rendered useless by their policies. One day they were functional and working, and the next day they were not. One of these was a fancy, very expensive jog-wheel remote that I rather liked (every one of these in use all got absolutely bricked, deliberately, in a bullshit move), and the other was a Sonos Bridge (a wireless access point) that they didn't deem worthy of working with new software (even though that was also bullshit).
The remaining device has mechanical issues (as old speakers sometimes do). This one is disappointing, but at least it isn't irrational.
we moved into a home that had wired speakers installed in every room all to a central Sonos enabled device - it is all old. It worked perfectly until this.
Funny thing is, we thought it was silly when we moved in - then we grew to love it. Now I hate them!
> It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
As a Sonos purchaser, ironically product longevity was the reason I bought so much of their stuff!
While other similar systems would drop support for old devices eventually, I could be confident with Sonos that I was investing in stuff that would continue to work.
… until now! I’ve started to lose confidence. Which is a shame - I’m moving into a new house and wanting a sub, but now questioning if that’s a sensible decision given I don’t know how long my older speakers will work for now they are going glitchy. Real shame!
> They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
Catalina literally just dumped half the software that ever ran on MacOS overnight to make the transition to Apple Silicon seem smoother than it actually was.
First of all "Even Apple" implies Apple is particularly bad, in fact it is one of the better ones in supporting older usecases and devices. But even then x86 to Apple silicon is not the roughest by far.
For me, it is the removal of x86-32 bit software support. The removal wasn't needed at all and broke all the steam games.
I assumed it was part of the migration plan to Apple silicon. Rosetta 2 makes x86 apps work on Apple silicon, but I had assumed that Apple could only really get 64-bit x86 apps working smoothly and that’s why they removed 32-bit support a few years earlier.
I can vouch for this, as I have a pile Sonos "bricks" that _used_ to be components of a costly yet functional sound system. Won't touch anything Sonos with a 10ft pole.
I like to reverse decisions further back. The connected speaker is basically a commodity at this point. Sonos does have some nice features, but they are very expensive. I think the ceo saw the down sales and lack of new products and rushed out the app hoping it would work and boost sales. Obviously it was a disaster, but I’m not sure if sticking to the status quo would have led to any different outcome in sales.
The app update they're talking about is the one that got released last year which is terrible, it keeps crashing, doesn't work with time zone and a bunch of other stuff
There's a bunch of stuff built around the old Logitech media server system, with open source implementations running on esp32 and raspberry pi, as well as a slew of other devices
> It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
What does this refer to? Did Sonos drop support for products? When was this, which products?
> Sonos has a good reputation for building quality speakers, but its latest move has disappointed some buyers. Recently, the company offered a trade-up program, giving legacy customers 30 percent off the latest One, Beam or Port. In exchange, buyers just had to "recycle" their existing products. However, what Sonos meant by "recycle" was to activate a feature called "Recycle Mode" that permanently bricks the speaker. It then becomes impossible for recycling firms to resell it or do anything else but strip it for parts.
> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.
I mean, the week the iPhone X came out, they put out an irreversible update for the iPhone 7 that made it unusable. They also tried to charge me 2,300$ to fix just one broken keyboard key. Apple is definitely that bad.
Please stop putting salespeople in charge of highly technical product companies like Sonos. I'm so glad that Tom Conrad is an engineer by training. I hope he can turn this mess around.
The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.
For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.
I don't think having a sales person in charge was the problem.
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.
I have experienced this most acutely with the most recent round of macOS and iOS updates.
Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.
I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
> The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
I haven’t owned Sonos gear in a long time, but certainly back in the day they had just amazing products. That SUB where it was so perfectly balanced? They did a demo (that you could easily reproduce at home) where you could have it driving “call the cops” noise disturbance bass without upsetting a nickel set lengthwise on top, just a great unit and not the only one. Awesome stuff.
But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”.
For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago.
Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
As a music fan one would think I'd be their target group. But I haven't even considered their product and classified it as "some smart crap that is an excuse to syphon data out and lock me in". So all stick, no carrot.
But Sonos doesn't sell any services/subscriptions, just products, correct? So even if they wanted to have recurring revenue how would they do it? They sell gadgets?
Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.
Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business.
A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase.
If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
> abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS
I don’t know about that part. UPnP is exactly the HTTP-abusing XML-laden layer-spanning horrorshow you expect from 2000s Microsoft where it was mainly supported, mDNS is a fairly compact and neat set of independent extensions to preexisting Internet protocols born during Apple’s short period of flirting with open standards. In a greenfield project, you’d need to show me some really impressive tooling to make me choose UPnP, because five minutes with the specs are enough to tell implementing or debugging the thing is going to be a nightmare.
(No experience with Sonos or their implementation of either.)
I had the same reaction, all the other parts of the parent comment sound bad but switching to mDNS seems like the one that should have been an improvement or at least neutral...
But it wasn't just a move from UPnP to mDNS with everything else remaining the same. They also moved to HTTP/WebSocket instead of UPnP eventing, added encryption.
While most complaints in this thread about the app all say "it's sluggish", with the initial release of S2 many had their systems that worked perfectly fine with S1 undiscoverable with S2. At the time all the advice on Sonos forums, Reddit, etc was "First check your router and make sure mDNS isn't disabled". Which caused a lot of people to have a kneejerk reaction of "wtf is this mDNS shit and what was wrong with the "old reliable UPnP"
Ditching a native framework for something JS-powered and running everything thru a cloud server sounds like technical decisions willfully made by engineering leaders.
That's an example of something that can be done well or done poorly.
AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.
Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.
If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.
If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.
It's not like the salesy-CEO was writing the code, there was still a bunch of engineers who said "hey this sounds like a great idea". Personally I want my CEOs to be on the sales side, make more money for the company. That being said you best have a good CTO/CIO that aren't sales-oriented.
Our company makes B2B for a rather technical niche.
We got a sales-oriented CEO who knows when to listen to us developers. It has worked very well for our company.
Being more sales-oriented he's found good business models and knows our customers well, and hence what our products are worth to our clients so we're not selling our products too cheap. This was the case before he took over from a more technical CEO.
While a CEO with an engineer background can certainly do well too, I think it's probably easier to find a good sales-based CEO that simply knows when to listen to their technical team. At least in theory...
> Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app.
That sure sounds like this was a deliberate choice.
That said, I suspect Sonos' market has mostly disappeared. A decade ago I paid $400+ to get streaming audio; now a lot of people are happy with Spotify Connect and $200 google speakers or a $50 refurb echo 4.
The new mDNS discovery mechanism works much better for me than the old one. I had two speakers that would constantly require reboots to be discovered with the old version but now they are 100% available.
Those would have been CTO decisions or at least recommendations as to the technical merits of the change, not the fault of the CEO.
Now if the CEO made the change for other reasons (usually financial, such as customer subscription lock-in) despite the technical downsides (which should have been presented by the CTO), then yes, in that case the blame would primarily fall to the CEO.
Nice article by Andy. It's astonishing that they released that magnitude of change, and that they didn't provide a way to roll back once it showed itself to be a car crash. It should have been an opt-in beta, then opt-out, and maybe then after the bugs are squashed, incrementally rolled out.
I understand why they'd to remove this big clatter of legacy protocols, simplify it, and encrypted everything. A tech-focused CEO would surely want that too, but perhaps might respect the amount of work and testing involved. What they forgot is that in a Sonos is a clatter of legacy protocols on top of speakers that are sonically "ok". Wasn't that their unique selling point? Why wouldn't a CEO with a sales background understand USP?
As someone pointed out: they want to turn once-off purchases into monthly subscription. Maybe. They see this enormous userbase and brainstorm ways to squeeze recurring revenue out of it, but ironically they ruin the product and turn an army of advocates into enemies.
This sounds more like a modern CTO felt the need to refactor the a big part of the codebase for the sake of it and if that wasn't foolish enough, they decided to not roll it out incrementally.
I'm not sure any single one if those was necessarily problematic so much as the fact they did all of transitions at the same time and perhaps didn't do enough diligence in testing and slowly rolling out to ensure parity. For instance they could have rolled out mdns support with fallback to upnp and perhaps iterated untill they knew for a fact mdns was finding all the same devices as upnp with similar or better latency. However it seems that's not what they did.
mDNS is used by all the major players in the iot space today and there is a reason for it. For instance I believe Chromecast uses mDNS for discovery. Routers have had a long time to work through any possible issues. New code will always suffer from bugs and I'm pretty sure that's been one of the problems they face more than anything else.
You blame the sales-oriented CEO for the problems but then point to a list of highly technical changes as the ultimate cause. A salesman knows nothing about these architecture decisions and would have trouble asking for them to be implemented even if they somehow knew it’s what they wanted to do.
Could a more technical CEO have turned the ship around more quickly? Sure. But let’s be honest, the blame rests at the feet of the engineering team. Someone got excited about using some new tech and didn’t fully consider the ramifications. This happens all the time. And if you’re lucky, the code review saves you, or if not then QA saves you, or if not then the beta testers save you. If a problem remains after that, then it tends to become really hard to undo, from an organization perspective.
These sound like extremely technical decisions that presumably engineering leads in the company came up with, signed-off on, and convinced leadership to go ahead with.
I doubt a Salesperson has the technical expertise to initiate any of those changes.
It could have been the other way around, though. Engineers could have been faced with calls asking for a higher degree of integration and dependence on cloud servers for profit reasons (carefully sold as better UX), then developed it because that's what they're paid to do.
> especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power.
That reminds me: When S3 dropped support for MD5 ciphers, it ended up causing problems for a number of their customers who had remarkably old computers connecting to S3. The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers they were now required to use. In one case it went from "just about keeping up" to "got no hope". That was a "fun" way to unexpectedly break folks.
> The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers
Sort of like "test your stuff simulating a really shitty network connection", perhaps something else in that vein would be "test your stuff with excessively slow crypto and longer-keys."
mDNS is superior to UPnP, they just made a compounding sum of bad choices that ended up in a bad architecture. I do hope companies start learning that you can't have suit doing running an engineering company
I've implemented both UPnP discovery and mDNS, and mDNS was quite a bit easier to make reliable than UPnP. However, if they did have a reliable UPnP system, it would almost certainly destabilise the software for any transition like this. There's just so many different network issues to deal with, it's tough to debug when a user reports a problem and it's probably an issue with their router which is only sold in Germany. It is very frustrating class of bugs, when the app just doesn't find devices on the network.
Wow, thanks so much for the succinct and informative summary. I’m an owner of multiple SONOS speakers and am enraged by how these changes have effectively crippled my devices that I spent much hard-earned cash on. I am beginning to despair. I hope and pray they can just roll back half of them.
I suspect it’s all related to centralisation and control and subscriptions to radio services and profit however so I won’t hold my breath. Most enshittifcation has profit at its root. :-(
Yep, it is definitely an engineer behind this, wanting to show off.
My job now is to deal with the aftermath of failed design choices at my company.
It only took a couple of guys to impose their deluded design, because noone stood up to call their bullshit.
My Sonos app experience is probably the worst of any smart devices I’ve owned. Dropped connections, unable to connect or stream, just all-around inconsistencies. Great speaker when it’s hardwired but the “smart” app is bad. Why did it take years for the chickens to come home to roost?
>Why did it take years for the chickens to come home to roost?
because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar, it's some of the best sound quality you can find for home audio, and it doesn't require a month of product research to figure it out. it's easily available in most big-box stores, and unlike some other brands they don't have a shit-tier line of products that look indistinguishable from their good stuff so you have to be cautious as a consumer to buy only the good stuff. if you go to best buy and spend $500 on sonos products, you're going to get your moneys worth.
it's too bad their app sucks, because their hardware doesn't.
I dont think this is true. I am no audiophile but Sonos is actually quite expensive vs getting some streamer like Wiim with basic cheap amp and any solid speaker brand - KEF, Elac, Klipsh, Polk…
I know its some choices but any of them are good choice its mostly flavours. What you get for same money will sound better and 100% last longer because you have modular system instead of glued box that stops working when Sonos stops caring about the product (like they did before).
FWIW there are several third-party mobile applications that work just fine to operate Sonos equipment.
The speakers expose a few SOAP-based APIs to any clients on the LAN. Those allow for track control, grouping, etc. They don't allow adding new music services, but they can do the vast majority of daily interaction. These APIs continue to work nearly flawlessly even for my Play:1 devices that are 10 years old.
Streaming via AirPlay is indeed hit-or-miss, but it hasn't gotten worse in the past couple years.
I control my Sonos from a jQuery-based web application I wrote nearly 10 years ago that runs on a raspberry pi in my closet. I have not had to change anything in several years, and I use my 15+device Sonos system all the time.
The new app is indeed a dumpster fire. Somehow the company managed to make their first-party application worse than any of the third-party applications.
We used Sonos at a place I used to work, and it was easily one of the worst tech experiences I've ever had. Constant issues. We had a 10-step troubleshooting guide that had to be referenced daily (until everyone had memorized the steps out of repetition), with a bonus (half-)joke step that was "dash it to the ground". Even during the infrequent and intermittent working periods, it was nothing special.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
The app experience was bad for years even before this new app. The strange thing is when I was complaining then there were always defensive voices ready to deny any bad experience. I’m glad it’s finally come to light. Spent so much for Sonos.
Well, it didn’t used to be bad. OG Sonos was awesome. If the ceo kept leading investors on with “just one more quarter/we are almost ready to launch the big fixes/etc” then I can understand why it took so long. AFAIK this is the first ceo that Sonos has ever ousted so I think it’s a pretty big deal.
Hoping the new one will have more foresight to not screw over existing customers in the face of the new shiny.
In other news, I hear Framework is looking to get into other hardware niches… if they ever made a networked speaker, I’d buy it.
I wonder how much of that is Sonos sucking vs bluetooth just being an absolutely terrible connection protocol. it's always a raindance prayer that bluetooth will work, even harder to have it pair. bluetooth makes printers seem like NASA level quality software.
Most of my Sonos speakers and soundbars worked before the app update and right after, all that became unreliable, across devices.
I’d say that leads me to believe it’s an app issue versus just Bluetooth. Agree that BT by itself has a reputation to match, but in this case Sonos is to blame. The other apps recommended in the post work well.
> The company said it would cost between $20 million and $30 million to fix these issues and decided to cut about 6% of its staff.
> Spence, in October, had acknowledged mistakes surrounding the app's release and said that he and seven other company leaders would forgo their bonuses.
People out of a job because of you and you're gonna forgo your bonuses.
> Spence, whose total compensation was $5.19 million in fiscal 2023, took a roughly $72,000 cash bonus.
I, like an idiot, sold my Onkyo Integra amplifier, radio tuner, tape deck, Canton and KEF speakers for next to nothing and switched to Sonos. I deeply regret it. In my kitchen, there’s an old Grundig radio and a Sonos speaker. Guess which one gets turned on in the morning and evening during meals?
I’m old so maybe that’s why I never understood the Sonos fascination. Sonos was also crazy expensive for what it was. Around covid I sold my almost 20 year old floor standing Paradigms and bought some KEFs because I needed something smaller. I glanced at Sonos, but thought no way do those sound as good or last 20 years.
Speakers with decent sound (sure, your separates system is going to sound better, but pretty decent).
They have some really fancy wireless mesh tech in an era where that's unheard of. They pick up your local music collection and have a controller application on most OS's that allows you to build stereo pairs or tv surround systems wirelessly, arbitrarily group together rooms in your house, stream music from wherever to wherever and generally just have music in the places you want it with little hassle. I still have some Sonos play:1 speakers I got in 2012 that are going strong, even though they live mostly outdoors now.
Now, if those aren't your use-cases, and you really do care about high fidelity sound (I don't), then it's probably not for you. But it has been great for me and I've built up quite a lot of speakers.
Unfortunately (and here's the subject of TFA) - in the middle of last year they screwed the pooch, and half the time their app doesn't even load any more :/
Canton speakers are legendary, I wish I had the money back then. A good friend of mine still has his and won‘t give them away for any new smart speaker.
The app is so bad that I'm about chuck three Sonos Ones in the trash (metaphorically) and replace them with HomePod Minis or whatever—and I would certainly never go back to Sonos products after that. Huge failure. The CEO should've been dumped months ago.
Maybe just get separate speakers and streamer like WiiM. You wont regret it if the streamer dies you will still have speakers and just replace the streamer.
This is the route I took. I did not want to get involved in the sonos ecosystem even though most people were telling me sonos was "so easy" to setup. My setup... passive speakers, an amp and a wiim streamer and I can swap out any of the pieces with any nother from another manufacturer at any time if I want.
I hate these stupid ‘smart’ devices. Personally, I just have some decent quality speakers hooked up to an good quality old school amp with an AirPort Express feeding into the line in.
I do this with WiiM. For me, the biggest thing is that I have speakers that are >20 years old that still work perfectly. Why replace what already works well?
I looked at the Sonos ecosystem for this, but their non-speaker devices are absurdly priced. The network audio streamer is 449 and the amp is 699. WiiM amps are either 299 or 379 and their network streamer ranges from 149 to 329. I have a few of the network streamers which were 149. They connect into my receiver, into an old amp I have, etc. and work perfectly.
Same. Denon receiver, some capable speakers, and Airport Express for Airplay (which I would love to replace for something with a bit less connection delay - come on, Apple)! Only the last part is dependent on a modern stack ,the first two will last decades.
I actively tell friends and family to not try to imitate my home setup after this app garbage, where as I know specifically of a few friends who got into SONOS based directly on my recommendation and my demonstrations of the system.
But surely the main reason for declining sales is the app.
And not just the app itself but the fact that despite mounting criticism from the community they didn't immediately revert it. Thus demonstrating that they don't really care about their own, up until that point, very loyal customers.
Even as a Sonos owner and former fan who detests the app, I doubt the app is the reason for declining sales. Competition is.
Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.
Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.
Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.
All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.
The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.
Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.
As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.
It's hard for me to believe this is the main reason, but I'd love to be shown otherwise.
My instinct is to think it's fuel on a fire that was already burning - declining sales across the market, smart speakers taking a big slice out of Sonos' pie, and missing the boat on new markets (headphones) … and then a bad app release being the straw that broke the camel's back.
Readit News
Even Apple has never been that bad. They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
People will think what you’re saying is hyperbole; however, I was on a walk with the family, and I saw a Sonos speaker in the trash. It looked like new and a fairly recent model. I lugged it home, and it was a $US500 Sonos Play:5 speaker system [1].
Once home, I plugged it in, and it powered up.
I tried to pair it with my iPhone using the new Sonos app, and it didn’t work (the app never found the speaker).
I then tried the same again using my development Android device, and it instantly worked!
Once it was set up with the Android app, I could access it via the iPhone version of the app.
I can only imagine some iPhone owner literally threw it in the trash because he couldn’t get the iOS app to work. Bonkers…
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/pb-BfEVPbWlDe-hkxfK0.png
EDIT: Whoops, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70
They (Sonos) basically willfully attempted to brick their consumer devices, and since many sonos customers were prosumer enthusiasts but not technical (hw or sw) it really did signal EOL for the products. Bananas. I still have a my Play1/3/5 infrastructure operating through Home Assistant and AirBridge that turns them into Airplay devices. It's not perfect but still gives them utility. Considering how much they f'n cost..
I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.
However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.
And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recy...
People don’t realize sound was solved decades ago. How they could get the same stereo their grandfather could have ordered from the sears catalog and some cabinets from that sears catalog and that would be better sound than they are capable of ever perceiving, and how it would last them their entire life on that one stereo and probably the lives of multiple generations of family members. With IO that has always been a standard and always will be a standard. And a stereo like this isn’t even terribly expensive. A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
Instead they are sold soundbars and other crap tiny speakers that are not built to last, and might use specific io to connect over open standards that have been around for decades. They end up spending quite a lot more money for a shit experience that they are none the wiser that there are even alternatives to, without becoming audiophiles themselves consuming hundreds of pages of relevant media in that niche.
What a cash cow of an industry.
Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago, partially because of better engineering and mostly because of advances in electronics. An entry level receiver today would wipe the floor with consumer level equipment from the 80s.
Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks. The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
It is ironic because traditional Hifi is in an amazing place in terms of value. I recently bought a budget (<$300) setup for my PC and I'm blown away by what a couple of modest bookshelf speakers, a modern mini-amp and a compact subwoofer can accomplish.
I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.
My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.
Was looking recently at the power requirements of an amp + subwoofer + 5 5.1 JBL surround speakers.
The setup was done decade ago, and the power needed for it was nuts. Something like 500W for a Denon amp and 250W for a JBL subwoofer?
For reference something like a OG HomePod consumes what 45W? The Sony srs xg500 boombox can last 30hours and is a giant room shaking boombox.
The difference in power efficiency between these old and new setups are nuts. Nevermind compatibility with AirPlay, streaming etc…
I have a rather nice NAD amplifier that I bought about 29 years ago. It had to be repaired once at about the 6 year mark. Recently, it has developed a new electronic failure mode that I don't believe can be repaired.
So ... yes, but let's not overdo the "never have to make another home audio purchase" part ...
It was a massive pain to put out all the cables, adjust the system manually little by little (the setup mic kinda helped, but wasn't that good).
Then I got a Sonos Beam and that set of "crap tiny speakers" with a fancy DSP brought so much more dimension to movies that it wasn't even funny. Upgraded to a Sub and it automatically offloaded those frequencies to it and the Beam got even better now that it didn't have to cosplay a subwoofer.
For setup all I had to do was walk around the space and wave my phone around and the difference was clearly audible even to my non-discerning ears.
Later I upgraded to an Arc + got two rears and everything got a lot better.
The v2 app is utter crap, I haven't had to use it for anything else than Trueplay adjustment when we moved a while ago. The v1 let me debug what the soundbar was receiving (my TV was sending data in the wrong format and I was just getting fancy stereo instead of Dolby Atmos). V2 doesn't have any power user features at all.
I'm not going back to a wired setup with a separate amp unless I get a dedicated theater room I can sound proof and manage the acoustics. I _am_ considering switching to a brand that doesn't need an app to setup, but it's slim pickings in the upper tier of soundbars.
This really isn't true at all. HiFi has an obscene amount of snake-oil and non-rigorous design decision making.
Audio Science Review (https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php) has documented this very clearly and well.
Custom solutions with, like, snapcast and raspberries (like mine), works and you don't need to deal with any of this, but then you need to deal with software setup annoyances. It get's technical.
The entire digital ecosystem seems to be heading this way. Even cars
Not wireless transmission, and not uniform spatial distribution.
AFAIK, Sonos was about those two. They didn't solve them either, there's still plenty of space to make a dent there.
Still rocking my early 90s system. Has required a couple of amp repairs (capacitors and sticky relay) but no big issue. Bought a Bluetooth DAC for streaming stuff. Job done.
The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
A few years ago my Denon A/V receiver crapped out and I decided to go "upmarket" and get an NAD T758. I accept a bit of quirkiness from a smaller name, but "quirkiness" doesn't come close to describing the design and functionality defects that plagued this thing. Everything from baffling menu navigation (not kidding: Pressing Enter did not select a menu entry; you were supposed to use an arrow key) to the fact that it would only pass 720p video because it reported erroneous EDID info to HDMI devices. It didn't pass the info from the connected display device; it just provided its own EDID blob to everything, which reported a max resolution of 720p.
The NAD also featured Dirac processing, which I shelled out for to get the full license and spent hours with a test mic profiling my room and speakers. Then... it would just lose the entire configuration. Deleted off the receiver. "We haven't been able to figure out why this happens," said NAD. In fact, in several years they never fixed a single one of the crippling defects I encountered and reported.
But NAD isn't the only shitshow in town. Let me address the biggest impediment to whole-home audio (or even multi-zone audio): manufacturers' bizarre conceit that anyone can use secondary zones that only play ANALOG sources. The NAD was crippled by this stupidity, as is the top-of-the-line Pioneer I bought to replace it.
In the case of the NAD, I addressed this defect by running RCA cables across the back of the receiver, from its preamp outputs to a CD-player input; and assigning that input to Zone 2. Why the hell didn't NAD just do that internally with a switch?
On the Pioneer, it's actually worse. There ARE no preamp outputs. It has THREE zones, one of which I can tie to the main one but the third, yep, can only play analog sources.
All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
BTW, I did build a patch bay with switches, to wire the secondary zone in parallel with the first... but this overloaded one pair of amps in the NAD and destroyed the entire receiver. Yep: NAD doesn't have a simple overload breaker. They just burn the entire amplifier board up; that's the breaker. Unfuckingbelievable.
But back to the main issue: Who is seriously going to dick around trying to select sources and adjust volume to each zone (with what, by the way, an app?) on one receiver instead of simply buying a bookshelf system for every remote room you want to play music in? I sure as shit wouldn't, and I'm the kind of person who ran digital cables under my house to an equipment closet so I could have a proper surround setup in my living room. I have a projector and home-built screen, but even I would never bother with the stupid usage scenario Pioneer, NAD, and the two other makers envision:
This scenario revolves around nonexistent people who are going to put on a RECORD or TAPE, then go to the other side of their house or down to their rec room for half an hour... and then come running back to the other side of the house to flip the record or tape over. WTF.
My iPad is too old to upgrade to the new OS, but yet no software is available for it in the store, because all new apps are encouraged to be re-released for the newest version of the OS.
My device is completely frozen in time from whatever software was installed on it when it went out of support.
I have two Play 5's that I have had for a decade and they're still currently set up working completely fine on an Apple device. That's a speaker that was released 16 years ago and still works through the Sonos app, still allows me to play Spotify, still works natively with the Playbar to watch movies and TV.
That sounds pretty good to me. If people want to throw out their hardware and buy new that's fine, but they haven't needed to throw out their Play 5's.
If I was still using an Apple iPhone from 2009 you can bet it would be a terrible experience
The remaining device has mechanical issues (as old speakers sometimes do). This one is disappointing, but at least it isn't irrational.
Funny thing is, we thought it was silly when we moved in - then we grew to love it. Now I hate them!
As a Sonos purchaser, ironically product longevity was the reason I bought so much of their stuff!
While other similar systems would drop support for old devices eventually, I could be confident with Sonos that I was investing in stuff that would continue to work.
… until now! I’ve started to lose confidence. Which is a shame - I’m moving into a new house and wanting a sub, but now questioning if that’s a sensible decision given I don’t know how long my older speakers will work for now they are going glitchy. Real shame!
Catalina literally just dumped half the software that ever ran on MacOS overnight to make the transition to Apple Silicon seem smoother than it actually was.
For me, it is the removal of x86-32 bit software support. The removal wasn't needed at all and broke all the steam games.
I like to reverse decisions further back. The connected speaker is basically a commodity at this point. Sonos does have some nice features, but they are very expensive. I think the ceo saw the down sales and lack of new products and rushed out the app hoping it would work and boost sales. Obviously it was a disaster, but I’m not sure if sticking to the status quo would have led to any different outcome in sales.
The app update they're talking about is the one that got released last year which is terrible, it keeps crashing, doesn't work with time zone and a bunch of other stuff
What does this refer to? Did Sonos drop support for products? When was this, which products?
> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-12-31-sonos-recycle-mode-expla...
The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.
For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn...
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.
Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.
I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
The fundamental problem with 95% of companies, and 99% of publicly listed companies.
But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”.
For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago.
Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business.
A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase.
If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
I don’t know about that part. UPnP is exactly the HTTP-abusing XML-laden layer-spanning horrorshow you expect from 2000s Microsoft where it was mainly supported, mDNS is a fairly compact and neat set of independent extensions to preexisting Internet protocols born during Apple’s short period of flirting with open standards. In a greenfield project, you’d need to show me some really impressive tooling to make me choose UPnP, because five minutes with the specs are enough to tell implementing or debugging the thing is going to be a nightmare.
(No experience with Sonos or their implementation of either.)
But it wasn't just a move from UPnP to mDNS with everything else remaining the same. They also moved to HTTP/WebSocket instead of UPnP eventing, added encryption.
While most complaints in this thread about the app all say "it's sluggish", with the initial release of S2 many had their systems that worked perfectly fine with S1 undiscoverable with S2. At the time all the advice on Sonos forums, Reddit, etc was "First check your router and make sure mDNS isn't disabled". Which caused a lot of people to have a kneejerk reaction of "wtf is this mDNS shit and what was wrong with the "old reliable UPnP"
Just once, I’d like to see a leader actively refuse these kinds of arguments when the process they have is objectively better.
Never once have I ever experienced an Electron-ified version of an app and thought, “oh yeah, this is better.”
AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.
Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.
If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.
If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.
We got a sales-oriented CEO who knows when to listen to us developers. It has worked very well for our company.
Being more sales-oriented he's found good business models and knows our customers well, and hence what our products are worth to our clients so we're not selling our products too cheap. This was the case before he took over from a more technical CEO.
While a CEO with an engineer background can certainly do well too, I think it's probably easier to find a good sales-based CEO that simply knows when to listen to their technical team. At least in theory...
Deleted Comment
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/it-was-the-wrong-dec...
In particular
> Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app.
That sure sounds like this was a deliberate choice.
That said, I suspect Sonos' market has mostly disappeared. A decade ago I paid $400+ to get streaming audio; now a lot of people are happy with Spotify Connect and $200 google speakers or a $50 refurb echo 4.
Now if the CEO made the change for other reasons (usually financial, such as customer subscription lock-in) despite the technical downsides (which should have been presented by the CTO), then yes, in that case the blame would primarily fall to the CEO.
I understand why they'd to remove this big clatter of legacy protocols, simplify it, and encrypted everything. A tech-focused CEO would surely want that too, but perhaps might respect the amount of work and testing involved. What they forgot is that in a Sonos is a clatter of legacy protocols on top of speakers that are sonically "ok". Wasn't that their unique selling point? Why wouldn't a CEO with a sales background understand USP?
As someone pointed out: they want to turn once-off purchases into monthly subscription. Maybe. They see this enormous userbase and brainstorm ways to squeeze recurring revenue out of it, but ironically they ruin the product and turn an army of advocates into enemies.
mDNS is used by all the major players in the iot space today and there is a reason for it. For instance I believe Chromecast uses mDNS for discovery. Routers have had a long time to work through any possible issues. New code will always suffer from bugs and I'm pretty sure that's been one of the problems they face more than anything else.
Could a more technical CEO have turned the ship around more quickly? Sure. But let’s be honest, the blame rests at the feet of the engineering team. Someone got excited about using some new tech and didn’t fully consider the ramifications. This happens all the time. And if you’re lucky, the code review saves you, or if not then QA saves you, or if not then the beta testers save you. If a problem remains after that, then it tends to become really hard to undo, from an organization perspective.
I doubt a Salesperson has the technical expertise to initiate any of those changes.
That reminds me: When S3 dropped support for MD5 ciphers, it ended up causing problems for a number of their customers who had remarkably old computers connecting to S3. The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers they were now required to use. In one case it went from "just about keeping up" to "got no hope". That was a "fun" way to unexpectedly break folks.
Sort of like "test your stuff simulating a really shitty network connection", perhaps something else in that vein would be "test your stuff with excessively slow crypto and longer-keys."
Kinda feels like those two issues are orthogonal.
Deleted Comment
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/26/apple-discoveryd-replac...
I suspect it’s all related to centralisation and control and subscriptions to radio services and profit however so I won’t hold my breath. Most enshittifcation has profit at its root. :-(
You think a salesperson is suggesting mDNS and frameworks?
My job now is to deal with the aftermath of failed design choices at my company. It only took a couple of guys to impose their deluded design, because noone stood up to call their bullshit.
Deleted Comment
because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar, it's some of the best sound quality you can find for home audio, and it doesn't require a month of product research to figure it out. it's easily available in most big-box stores, and unlike some other brands they don't have a shit-tier line of products that look indistinguishable from their good stuff so you have to be cautious as a consumer to buy only the good stuff. if you go to best buy and spend $500 on sonos products, you're going to get your moneys worth.
it's too bad their app sucks, because their hardware doesn't.
I know its some choices but any of them are good choice its mostly flavours. What you get for same money will sound better and 100% last longer because you have modular system instead of glued box that stops working when Sonos stops caring about the product (like they did before).
Deleted Comment
When they came out, there was nothing else that had their combination of sound quality and app features.
Before their new app, the competition had basically caught up, Sonos was only marginally better in a few ways.
With their new app, I'd never recommend Sonos.
The speakers expose a few SOAP-based APIs to any clients on the LAN. Those allow for track control, grouping, etc. They don't allow adding new music services, but they can do the vast majority of daily interaction. These APIs continue to work nearly flawlessly even for my Play:1 devices that are 10 years old.
Streaming via AirPlay is indeed hit-or-miss, but it hasn't gotten worse in the past couple years.
I control my Sonos from a jQuery-based web application I wrote nearly 10 years ago that runs on a raspberry pi in my closet. I have not had to change anything in several years, and I use my 15+device Sonos system all the time.
The new app is indeed a dumpster fire. Somehow the company managed to make their first-party application worse than any of the third-party applications.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
Hoping the new one will have more foresight to not screw over existing customers in the face of the new shiny.
In other news, I hear Framework is looking to get into other hardware niches… if they ever made a networked speaker, I’d buy it.
I’d say that leads me to believe it’s an app issue versus just Bluetooth. Agree that BT by itself has a reputation to match, but in this case Sonos is to blame. The other apps recommended in the post work well.
> Spence, in October, had acknowledged mistakes surrounding the app's release and said that he and seven other company leaders would forgo their bonuses.
People out of a job because of you and you're gonna forgo your bonuses.
> Spence, whose total compensation was $5.19 million in fiscal 2023, took a roughly $72,000 cash bonus.
Well, the board seems to have fired him too?
Deleted Comment
Speakers with decent sound (sure, your separates system is going to sound better, but pretty decent). They have some really fancy wireless mesh tech in an era where that's unheard of. They pick up your local music collection and have a controller application on most OS's that allows you to build stereo pairs or tv surround systems wirelessly, arbitrarily group together rooms in your house, stream music from wherever to wherever and generally just have music in the places you want it with little hassle. I still have some Sonos play:1 speakers I got in 2012 that are going strong, even though they live mostly outdoors now.
Now, if those aren't your use-cases, and you really do care about high fidelity sound (I don't), then it's probably not for you. But it has been great for me and I've built up quite a lot of speakers.
Unfortunately (and here's the subject of TFA) - in the middle of last year they screwed the pooch, and half the time their app doesn't even load any more :/
I looked at the Sonos ecosystem for this, but their non-speaker devices are absurdly priced. The network audio streamer is 449 and the amp is 699. WiiM amps are either 299 or 379 and their network streamer ranges from 149 to 329. I have a few of the network streamers which were 149. They connect into my receiver, into an old amp I have, etc. and work perfectly.
As CEO of a public company you get about 3 quarters down before you're out.
And not just the app itself but the fact that despite mounting criticism from the community they didn't immediately revert it. Thus demonstrating that they don't really care about their own, up until that point, very loyal customers.
Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.
Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.
Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.
All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.
The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.
Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.
As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.
I doubt Sonos is around in a few years’ time.
My instinct is to think it's fuel on a fire that was already burning - declining sales across the market, smart speakers taking a big slice out of Sonos' pie, and missing the boat on new markets (headphones) … and then a bad app release being the straw that broke the camel's back.