Sonos Can't Release Old App for Customers Unhappy With Design Changes

So glad I never jumped on this brand, it seems to be a dumpster fire lately.

Edit: This is also why I won't buy into any "smart" speakers, from any manufacturer. The software can get pulled from you at any time and the "smarts" of the speaker will be useless long before the speaker itself dies.

The fact that this CEO is still going to work every day at Sonos is inexcusable.

I got into Sonos in 2016 because their speakers were well made, sounded amazing, and they had the best mobile and desktop (Mac) apps out there. They were clean, attractive, had intuitive interfaces and they 'just worked'. What sealed the deal for me, over and beyond the solid Sonos 'mesh' network which would bypass the need for the unreliable Apple AirPlay, was the fact that I could connect to any Sonos system and play music directly from my iTunes playlists directly from either my iPhone, iPad or Macs.

A few years later, after I added many more speakers to my system, Sonos decided to screw all their customers who don't stream and kill the ability to play music directly from an iOS device or Mac. You had to use a streaming service. I was in disbelief as this was one of the reasons why I chose the more expensive Sonos option over the competition at the time.

If that wasn't enough, Sonos completely revamped their beautiful, stable, easy to use desktop and mobile apps and turned them into clunky, unintuitive, unattractive apps with quality control issues. They, like many others at the time, followed Apple's awful GUI aesthetic (hide everything, remove all elegant features and overlays, require more taps, menus and clicks with endless wasted space).

With these dramatic changes and after spending a fortune on Sonos hardware, I sent a scathing email to the then CEO and he and one of this PR people actually responded, and after a lot of back and forth, this communication turned into an actual conference phone call. They were a smaller company in those days and I mentioned in my email that I purchased a total of 21 Sonos speakers, sound-bars and subs and installed them throughout my home, so perhaps that's why they responded.

The call wasn't very productive as they blamed Apple for why users could no longer play locally stored music (which was another way of saying that they were not going to invest time and money to keep up with the way Apple stores music locally), then told me to use a PC or Android (!) instead. Or, 'continue using your Apple devices, but use AirPlay instead of the Sonos mesh network'.

I lost it. I reminded them that I went with Sonos over the competition to AVOID using AirPlay and because I do not stream and wanted to play my locally saved music and playlists right from my iOS and Mac devices directly to my expensive Sonos system. I reminded them that they rendered my entire system, setup and investment useless, and that their 'software updates' effectively changed the products that I purchased just a few years ago. After your typical PR apologies and double-speak, their last bit of advice was for me to buy and setup a music server as a workaround.

Ever since this massive software overhaul and the removal of features, Sonos software has been their Achilles' heel and their inner-saboteur ever since. I am convinced that they started to outsource their software to a subpar company and have never looked back while gaslighting customers into thinking that 'it's better than ever before'. With each update the apps would get more and more clunky, ugly, unintuitive and buggy AF, so this latest debacle does not surprise me in the least.

Sonos makes excellent hardware that sounds amazing and built like tanks, but their software has sucked for many years, and I am glad that it's now finally getting the massive attention that it deserves. They need to go back to the drawing board and start over from the ground up because if they think the app was good prior to this latest hot mess of an update (if they can even find a way to revert back to it), they are sorely mistaken.

May want to adjust the title. The main reason people don't like it is because the new app has made people's systems unusable.

For example, multiple speakers that used to work for me just don't anymore. I haven't changed any settings within Sonos or on my wifi network.

I appreciate Macrumors and all of the other tech outlets reporting on this to keep the fire lit so they fix our systems so we can use them again.

Why on EARTH would you publicly say you’re considering doing something that gets a lot of peoples hopes up, then yank the rug out and say “sorry…j/k!”

This situation is gonna become a case study for leadership incompetence in every business school’s freshman coursework here forward.

Something has happened to this company since they went public! These are some real growing pains. Even their messaging about this old app is a mess.

Yes, they went public. That tends to be the end of the fun era of things.