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Sonos Says Its Controversial App Redesign Took 'Courage' (theverge.com) 76

Posted by msmash from the it-takes-courage dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos has responded to the avalanche of feedback -- some good, plenty bad -- about the company's redesigned mobile app that was released on May 7th. In the days since, customers have complained about missing features like sleep timers, broken local music library management, and no longer having the ability to edit playlists or the upcoming song queue. More alarmingly, the Sonos app's accessibility has also taken a hit, something the company says it's aiming to resolve by next month.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Sonos confirms that it's keenly aware of the gripes that customers have expressed about the new app. It's hearing their response and is working to address the functionality that has (for now) gone missing. But the company is also standing behind its decision to roll out the app this week, basically describing it as a rough patch that will, in theory, lead to a much better experience for everyone down the line. "Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention," said chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin. "It takes courage to rebuild a brand's core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future."
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Sonos Says Its Controversial App Redesign Took 'Courage' More

Sonos Says Its Controversial App Redesign Took 'Courage'

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  • I guess it also takes courage... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:06AM (#64459713) Homepage Journal
    I guess it also take courage...to actually WAIT till you have a functional product, well tested....before releasing it...?

    • Re:I guess it also takes courage... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:17AM (#64459751)
      Don't be stupid, a manager's resume needs to include about how they oversaw and launched something new. Why bother waiting until its actually ready and delay career opportunities.

      • This is the exact reason that Canada went ahead and launched the Phoenix payroll system in a full rollout with no testing. We are still paying for that fricking debacle, caused because Diane Finley wanted to have the rollout happen while she was still Minister of Public Services and Procurement, and she was due to leave in a few months. IBM asked that the rollout be delayed, but she ignored them because her resume needed the padding.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altus ( 1034 )

      The cost to this is a complete end to feature development in the app, including new hardware support. Business wise this is not very practical. Sure you can try to roll out your new features in the old app and support the new hardware in the old app while still desperately trying to get the new app up to the same level of service as the old but for most development teams that is not practical and for most businesses (particularly ones that produce hardware) pushing out feature support and hardware support

      • The cost to this is a complete end to feature development in the app, including new hardware support. Business wise this is not very practical. Sure you can try to roll out your new features in the old app and support the new hardware in the old app while still desperately trying to get the new app up to the same level of service as the old but for most development teams that is not practical and for most businesses (particularly ones that produce hardware) pushing out feature support and hardware support u

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Altus ( 1034 )

          You may think that MVP means "has all the features that the old app did" but that is not what MVP means. So what I described is what the problem is. The disagreement we have comes down to the definition of MVP for this project. Now I don't know if I would agree with every decision this team made for including or excluding features but I can say with certainty that I completely disagree with the definition of MVP being "does everything the old app did" because that old app was not a Minimum Viable Product

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            If a company wants to UP their game, they need it to move UP, not down.

            Perhaps they should try actually architecting their product so it can be updates/upgraded in a modular fashion.

          • You may think that MVP means "has all the features that the old app did" but that is not what MVP means.

            If you are selling your wares to the general consumer...and you want to actually keep them happy and keep them as customers, then MVP means "put out something that works and makes the customers happy".

            And..I would argue that replacing the controls of equipment they bought from you, with something LESS functional than what they bought for no perceivable added value, is not a valid MVP to shoot for for re

      • I bought gear last week, that gear no longer has the features it did 6 days ago after this update. This is $3000 (Arc, Sub, and 2 Era 300s) in equipment for my home. I'm never buying Sonos again. You know what is funny? Sonos still supports the Sonos 1 app. So actually having older equipment works better than anything they released in the last 3 years.

        Also no new hardware came out with this, so it's just a regression. I can't even get TruePlay to run so I can never adjust the speaker placement in the room.

    • I'm sorry but I just don't have the courage to buy their products.
      • By courage, they mean money, right? Sonos said it took money to redesign their app. Probably not much but that sounds about right.

  • Deeply regret getting Sonos (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:11AM (#64459729)

    I have 20 sonos speakers in-use, plus another 6-8 stored because they aren't needed anymore. Ironically my home is actually wired for whole-house speakers, but I still decided to stick this route after moving in.

    It used to be that I could control it perfectly via Home Assistant-- grouping, zones, playlists, favorites... all with a nice dashboard. The app functioned, but this let me do everything I needed to with a single tap or two. Too bad enshitification has become the norm these days with companies. Now if I am lucky HomeAssistant can stop music when the app stops working, but changing anything is lost and individual or zone volume control is long gone.

    • We're building a new house and will have wired speakers. We want to keep using Sonos, but I don't trust them enough to do something like getting an Amp for every room. Will probably just use a Sonos port with an amplifier to hit most of the rooms with one zone. Too freaking expensive and risky otherwise.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Trust them with what?

        The complaint here is usability of an app, not fundamental function of the system. People think as long as they don't actually say anything, they can impugn a company at will. Sonos is best in class at what it does, whether you "trust" them or not. And why would you "get an Amp" for every room, that would be idiotic and solve no imaginary problem. Also, a "one zone" Sonos system does nothing and the Sonos Port has a lot of latency. It appears you know nothing about Sonos.

        • Trust them with spending thousand and thousands of dollars and continue to offer a product that works. Why is that a question? Do you buy a dozen $500 pieces of sound equipment and replace it every year? You clearly haven't walk into any new, above average price home. Someone, somewhere has decided that every single room with ceiling speakers should be individually controllable, which, to be clear, is exactly what Sonos pushes. An Amp doesn't even put out enough power to properly support more than one room
        • No, the complaint here is about the fundamental function of the system. If you use a NAS to play music you cannot even search anymore in your library with the new version of the app. Of course, it still plays music, but good luck in selecting the tracks you want.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Just curious what the reasoning is for whole-house speakers. What do you do with them?

        • Theoretically you could listen to music any any room, but it's a bit of a stupid idea IMHO. And, yes, I have speakers in every room due to the previous homeowner. I never listen to any of them so it's a bit of a waste.

        • For me, it is the wife and myself in a pretty big place. We like having music in every room... including the garage. Having it at a low level but pervasive is a nice way to have it as background.

    • I feel your pain. So much frustration with getting a streaming/wireless setup working as you want, just for the vendors to jack it up. I've been through that loop so many times with Apple airplay. Hard to stomach because I've always been a big "Bet on Apple" person.

      What to do about it tho?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      I'm not familiar with HomeAssistant.. I have all of 3 Sonos ZP90s, S5, purchased about 15 years ago, and using a Local NAS for music library storage. Couldn't you just stop upgrading the Sonos software and use the HomeAssistant with the old version?

      Sonos stopped releasing updates for old hardware anyway, and even put the Sonos S1 software under an Older App that doesn't get updates.

      The development of new features is Nil, they're completely in stasis, But the features are Also complete and 100% adequate

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cob666 ( 656740 )
        I have an older ZP100 in my garage office that is close to 20 years old, is working perfectly fine and can still group with my 2 newer players. Because I have EOL hardware I can't upgrade to the new Sonos app, which I'm perfectly OK with.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Because I have EOL hardware I can't upgrade to the new Sonos app, which I'm perfectly OK with.

          Yep yep.. the only updates to the App ever worth anything were the addition of Online services such as Pandora or Spotify. They're neat novelties, but not worth when you have 700 GB of M4A (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files you ripped over the years. I'd spend a small fraction of the $100 a year to just buy a few new CDs per year outright instead. Merely maintaining 1 Spotify sub would have cost $1200 befo

      • The older ones were fine; you could control everything via REST. The problem is that they broke some functionality in the REST API, and then one of the newer speakers we bought forced the system to be upgraded to "S2" a few years back. We got the new speaker after a power issue damaged the old one. Today control via REST is totally broken, and the API that is used now is extremely limited in what you can actually do.

        The easy way around it is to just use the system as a Spotify target, but when you have a

    • Same: I have things in the music library on my server and on my phone (same library) that Sonos can't find on Amazon music.

      Hundreds of dollars in, over a thousand in, and Sonos removed the ability to play from my Android. I don't plan on giving Sonos SMB credentials for my server, either.

      It's like Ford removing the "forward gears" feature from a car after you buy it.

      Never will I buy from this shit show company again.

  • To Paraphrase Hanlon's Razor... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GFS666 ( 6452674 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:15AM (#64459735)
    ..."Never attribute to courage that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

  • Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an 18 year old in a trench learning a second language is wondering what English word is used for facing off against Russian infantry, artillery, and tanks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      English is not so useful in that situationl. "trakhni menya" probably would suit. Perhaps Sonos should use that next time.

  • Is this a new trend? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:24AM (#64459781) Journal

    So when new revisions of products or services are announced that piss users off, we should call that "courage" now, rather than "stupid" ?

    • Aren't they the same thing? I mean running into the forest and punching a bear is very courageous as well.

  • Thanks chumps (Score:3)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:24AM (#64459785)

    We'll pass this information along to our team in India.

  • So, what is so new about the app and how they are making their leap forward?

    I can see the crap, I'm honestly curious what is being improved/revolutionized? Have Sonos claimed what it will do better?

  • Can Sonos do anything right?

    I stopped buying their stuff when the lawsuits began. For years they ran a good service. They obviously are not interested in such things anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      How is the service any less good now?

      What you are not saying about the "lawsuits" was what they were about. Sonos was buying back old products, and to save costs they had the users discard them rather than ship them back. To prevent use of their own bought-back equipment, Sonos disabled them. The lawsuits were about disabling their own possessions.

      And, of course, this has nothing to do with whether their service is "good" nor does it suggest it no longer is. But what it does do is slime the company, as

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        S1 vs S2. Also the lawsuits were patent lawsuits pitting Sonos against every smart speaker maker.

        Sonos sucks and you're a shill. I'm stuck with 7 boat anchors.

  • What a bullshit response (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:28AM (#64459811)

    Long ago I learned a rule from Hazel McCallion (a regionally famous and respected mayor): You can start with no and later switch to yes, but you can't start with yes and switch to no.

    Later on in life, in IT, I learned a new variation of the rule: You can add functionality but you better have a REALLY good reason for taking it away.

    There is no excuse for releasing an 'update' that takes away basic functionality. This would appear to have been a project where they started with a deadline as their primary goal. That is a very, very bad way to run a project.

    If they had any actual professionalism, they would have looked at the existing app and determined how long they needed to build their new app with all those features (and hopefully with something new as a reason for the update), and made that a soft deadline to be pushed if they didn't have all the parts ready in time.

    It doesn't take courage to push half-built crap out the door and take away the existing working application... it takes incompetence and arrogance.

    • Re:What a bullshit response (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Smonster ( 2884001 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:40AM (#64459835)
      My speculation is someone no longer with the company was in charge of the old app. Their separation agreement required them to continue to provide support for a set period of time in trade for continued royalties. The time has now lapsed and Sonos could not figure out support for themselves and didn’t want to continue to pay out royalties so they released this replacement software they can maintain and build upon. The fact it is shittier is because they didn’t devote the proper resources to the project. Again pure speculation, but not an uncommon situation in the software field. I am glad I still have the old app.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        Probably true. The thing was, the company is based upon the software. The current leadership just does not get it. I am going to sell off what speakers I have while there still is a market for them. That won't last forever.

      • I tend to assume that for any of these overhauls where everything is shiny but functionally much degraded

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        I'm fairly sure Sonos develops its own mobile app. I know some folks who worked over there on their native apps. Maybe they changed that but they certainly used to be in the app business and they are hiring for it currently.

      • This is very well possible, because otherwise it seems they threw away the existing codebase just for fun.
    • There is no excuse for releasing an 'update' that takes away basic functionality.

      And yet, with almost every "update" of Windows, basic functionality is removed. And people continue to use it.

      • Recently, MS has been pushing Outlook and Teams updates that are missing functionality present in previous versions. It's crazy, but due to their market stranglehold they can get away with it.

  • I have an apple nike watch series 3, the watch itself no longer gets OS updates but the nike app apparently has because the watch app itself no longer runs on the watch since it depends on a newer version of the watch os. Just incredible how stuff like this can break w/ basically no user recourse. Out of spite now I really do not want to buy a newer apple watch even though the nike run club app was super motivating to track runs, runs per week, per month, per year, total milage, etc. And having this on the
    • just buy a new watch dude. Do you still use a black and white TV or have you made the upgrade to colour yet?

      • Black and White TVs continued to work for 40+ years after colour was introduced.

        • This. STILL work with the appropriate DTV converter.

          It's not normal, ethical or OK in any way for a manufacturer to break your product AFTER You've bought it.

          By the same token, it's not smart to put yourself in the hands of a manufacturer who has done so.

          Flee Sonos is the only smart course of action. We'd already resolved not to spend a dollar more with these clowns before this latest insult to their users.

        • Good point well made. And the post below me too.

          i just about bailed with sonos when they switched the whole s1/s2 app thing. Ive been thinking for a while just to go back to a hifi tuner amp for radio and a bluetooth speaker for âphone stuffâ(TM) . All this smart speaker/app stuff is not convenient to use.

  • Typical Agile (Score:3)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:48AM (#64459863)

    Ship completely unacceptable "MVP". Test in production. Fix later. Lose reputation and customers in between. All this because someone told you that you have to follow a hip new methodology that prioritised speed over quality. Not the first. Not the last.

  • Courage is the new YOLO (Score:3)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:52AM (#64459875)

    It's what grownups yell before doing something dumb.

  • I have courage (Score:3)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @12:00PM (#64459901)

    The courage to not buy Sonos.

    • The courage to not buy Sonos.

      Yes, sometimes it does take courage to resist doing something that's convenient, but which you know will probably end badly.

      Almost nobody reading this should be in the least surprised about what Sonos did. Lying down with dogs, bargaining with the Devil, making a deal with Darth Vader, etc...

  • Iâ(TM)m sure.

    Gotta ship something. Even if itâ(TM)s worse. Else we will fall behind like all those hip authors tell us.

  • Why am I reminded of Apple? (Score:4, Informative)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @12:25PM (#64459995)

    Oh yeah - headphone jacks and Tim Cook. I wonder if the Sonos wonk quoted was aware of stealing Cook's "courage" line, or if he did it subconsciously. Hmm - manipulative, or clueless? I suppose it could be both...

  • Full functionality may never come back. This may just be an attempt to simplify the software and its maintenance. Tell people full functionality is coming later, then see how many people leave, and if not many people leave, keep the software simpler.

    As an example, Ubiquity did the same with their Unifi product line few years ago. They said the same thing about all the missing functionality in their new software. It's been a couple of years and it's become apparent that their goal was to remove features p

  • Sounds like bull shit to me.

  • When did companies start expecting pity? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @12:42PM (#64460049)

    No Sonos it did not take courage. You did something, don't expect us to have any feelings for you what so ever. You built a shit interface, don't expect us to pity you for your "courage". Same with all companies recently. What did Sony say yesterday? "We're still learning". No you're not, no pity for you. You made a dumb call, own up to it. Apple, it did not take "courage" to remove the headphone jack, you made a business decision driven by dollars.

    Fuck off with the whining. Do a good job, or don't, but don't make shithouse pity-excuses.

  • Why are updates usually bad? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lofoforabr ( 751004 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @12:55PM (#64460089)
    One thing I learned: when there is an update to something, it's usually for the worse. Useful features get removed, unneeded bloat is added, interface becomes a mess, settings are lost, and so on. Sure, not always, but most of the times, at least for me, these kinds of updates / redesigns are very bad.

    • Depends on a product maturity. When something does everything you can think of already then an update is bad. When it doesn't, and the update aligns with expectations it is good.

  • Don't understand why they cant just leave it alone (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DrWho42 ( 558107 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @01:32PM (#64460223) Homepage
    I have a bunch of Sonos speakers and I love them for playing my music. The incessant upgrading is very frustrating for me. Why do I need to log in? I don't use any streaming; all of my media is sitting in files on a server on my LAN. All Sonos needs to do is 1) play the files, and 2) not change. It did #1 when I bought everything years ago, but they seem to be unable to do #2. Do they want me to pay subscription fees for the hardware that I bought years ago? Why is it necessary for Sonos to walk the path of enshittification?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      Do they want me to pay subscription fees for the hardware that I bought years ago?

      Yes.

      Why is it necessary for Sonos to walk the path of enshittification?

      See question 1.

      Note: I have no horse in this race. I don't own a single Sonos product. I have no clue what they charge for, or what they don't. I just assume they are the next "Wink": You buy their (overpriced) hardware on the "promise" that it will work in perpetuity. Then, once they realize how much of that sweet sweet recurring subscription money they are missing out on they pull the rug out from under you.

  • It was literally yesterday that I posted a comment about not wanting to buy products with mandatory and pointless "apps". Sonos is a speaker. Why does a speaker need an app? (I recall that a few years ago I was looking for a new Bluetooth speaker, and Sonos had some good reviews, but this was a deal-breaker for me and I bought something else instead).

    • Sonos is not really a speaker, until recently it did not even support Bluetooth streaming. It is more like an independant audio system.
      If you are using a NAS, the speakers themselves do the indexing, fetch the files over the network and do the decoding.
      If you are using streaming services, the speakers themselves connect to the internet and get the stream.
      The applications / etc are only to control them, they do no streaming... you can listen to music without even having a smartphone or computer powered o
  • Perhaps Sonos could put someone on updating the SMB protocol supported by their offerings from SMB 1 to at least SMB 2 (which came out in 2008) or ideally SMB 3 (which came out in 2012). SMB 1 was already nine years out of date when Sonos launched the Sonos One in 2017.
    • Actually they support SMB v2 and v3 since the S2 version of their app (which was released about 4 years ago), and they did deprecate SMB v1 with this update.

  • 'Chief Product Officer' ... Let me fix that for you: 'Chief doesn't know what is going on - officer'
    pressured to push something new and exciting, no idea what he was doing.
    I think even the most casual idiot user would immediately realize that local library for audiophiles is sort of an issue.
    Hire engineers. Listen to them.

    Did this guy used to work at Boeing?
    Is he about to send a resume over to Boeing?

  • You are acoustic-heads hardware geeks not software gurus much less wireless savvy

    Your acoustic chops are killer to $30k HiFi nerds pet electronic stacks.

    Imagine Tesla, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc whose core competency needs acoustic chops going forward – synergy. Boom!

    UI/UX networking, wireless and integration are increasingly known disciplines integrating convenience, expanding access and marrying hardwares across platforms seamlessly.

    SONOS needn’t reinvent those wheels like it had to do with audio

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