Sonos CEO says the old app can't be rereleased
theverge.com
theverge.com
Essentially they replaced the 15 year old, and incredibly robust network based on UPnP, with a new system using mDNS+HTTP+Websockets. And at the same time stuck their cloud in the loop for connecting to third party music services.
It's resulted in a much more fragile networking stack, far more prone to incompatibilities with users WiFi configurations. Which due to being so much heavier, some of their older hardware may struggle with. And that's all before you consider the UX changes in the app, and the missing functionality (how do you release a forced upgrade before finishing all old, and essential, functionality?!)
I assume that they have started removing some/all of the old code from the speakers which makes the old app incompatible.
This seems likely, but I have yet to see real evidence of this theory, such as an insider or one of those "replaced, expensive, former in-house employees" speaking.
A clean rewrite of a wireless networking stack that does real-time synced audio streaming and device discovery on any users home WiFi (which is notoriously bad!) is a decision to face a lot of pain finding the edge cases that were previously fixed 10y ago.
/v1/unbelievable/hubris/
Rather than a UDP packet going to my speaker next to me in <1ms, it now requires an authenticated encrypted round trip to the other side of the world and back.
The mDNS is an implementation issue that could be resolved without such a significant, noticeable, irreversible effect on latency as with the cloud integration.
Instead it is the usual case of development in search of a new horizon.
A long time ago I worked on hacking airplay support for sonos speakers and it wouldn't have been possible without inspecting a lot of plaintext wireshark traffic.
I had all speakers join my WiFi with none on LAN.
This smells of someone who is not a network engineer. mDNS works fine, it has known ways to route it across broadcast domains, and actually, way more products out of the box can "reflect" mDNS across VLANs than SSDP. What on earth does that have to do with broadcasting "between radios"?.
> This is because the speakers all know where each other are on the local network (thanks to SSDP),
But you just said above they switched to mDNS?
I guess that means it's entirely engineering practice or maturity. That just makes me sad :(
Meanwhile, Sonos requires you to login to their server with your real identity or your speakers are bricked. And they have the worst apps ever. I've wasted a lot of time trying to get them working.
If I may rant on a more macro level, to pump their company valuation, Sonos and many other brands (Phillips Hue, for example) want you to have an account, to use their software, etc. But I don't want to have to have an account or use an app to use my lightbulbs or play music from my speakers. I don't want to maintain a relationship with the manufacturer of my floor tiles or plastic spatula either. Just make your thing work and get out of the way. The best service in areas where customers do not want a relationship -- which is almost all of them -- is to be invisible.
I don’t know if this sounds as insane to you as it does to me - but a device that does nothing else but emit coloured light needs a frickin account for SECURITY reasons?
Of course I know the real reason is to extract all kinds of data from me but man if this ain’t done Brave New World shit I don’t know.
You're vastly underselling Hue. You have automations (such as waking you up with a sunrise, simulating presence, etc), integrations (sync from PC, TV, good local API that can be used by various home automation systems) and importantly, remote access.
The last part can't work securely without an account, and accounts also allow you to have access controls (this user can only control lights, but not any of the more advanced settings, because you know your roommate/spouse/kids shouldn't be touching that).
The whole thing has been wildly overblown.
I don’t want an expensive bridge or a Hue account or another app or another way to setup automations or anything else. Just sell me smart bulbs goddamit.
Assuming you've bought into those ecosystems. I haven't, and use Hue directly and via Home Assistant. I don't intend to add other cloud services
> I don’t want an expensive bridge or a Hue account or another app or another way to setup automations or anything else. Just sell me smart bulbs goddamit
Then buy from another vendor that only sells smart bulbs and you have to DIY the rest? It's like complaining your Rolls-Royce comes with too many features such as TVs and umbrellas in the doors, while you just want a working car with 4 wheels - go buy a Ford Fiesta then.
But they are not selling a Rolls Royce: they are selling idiots a ford fiesta they’ve replaced the physical key with a cloud-based, vendor locked smartphone app, whilst calling that a unique selling point which justifies the rolls Royce price tag.
Whilst generating a lot e-waste in the process.
To be clear, my issue is not with them offering this as a part of their product for those with no alternative, but instead with forcing it on those that do.
What's the e-waste? Everything they have ever made is still supported, and I personally have bulbs working fine for 10+ years.
> But they are not selling a Rolls Royce: they are selling idiots a ford fiesta they’ve replaced the physical key with a cloud-based, vendor locked smartphone app, whilst calling that a unique selling point which justifies the rolls Royce price tag.
No, they're selling a premium product. High prices, best features (including highest luminosity smart bulbs on the market), lots of good integrations, good UX.
> To be clear, my issue is not with them offering this as a part of their product for those with no alternative, but instead with forcing it on those that do
They aren't even forcing the hub. You can connect their bulbs to any compatible Zigbee / Bluetooth system and work with it.
That's unlike every other smart device - and it's obvious why: selling a basic Zigbee->Matter bridge with a Hue logo on it at a 40x markup is a great revenue source, they get to insert themselves into your home and siphon up analytics, and they don't even have to spend any money adding Matter support to their bulbs. All to provide generic, basic and out-of-the-box functionality that you already have if you use Homekit or Google Home.
Fantastic! And fantasticly wasteful.
> Do I need a Philips Hue Bridge to connect my devices via Matter?
> Yes. A Philips Hue Bridge, the smart lighting hub for the Philips Hue system, enables Matter for all your Hue products
Aka: you need to buy a hub from us.
> With Bluetooth control, you’re limited to only being able to operate your smart lights within Bluetooth range – about 10 metres
Damn, ford fiesta keys have a longe range than that :)
It’s a shameless excuse to sell an extra product, which is why they haven’t added matter support to their bulbs natively like every other smart bulb maker, and I’m not sure why you’re so keen on this not being the case.
I mean, you can buy the bulbs and connect them to any zigbee bridge, right?
I deliberately avoid WiFi devices as these often demand WAN access for registration, control. Matter often seems like the worst of both worlds but we'll see.
I bought a WiimAmp and bookshelf speakers. The software is good but not perfect. It has Spotify and Tidal connect, so you use those apps directly. Which is great as they have much better search and general UX.
Most post-sales updates have negative value for consumers. More ads, more features that we don’t want, and more bugs.
Speak for yourself. As an example with Hue, when I started using it around a decade ago, there were no automations (like simulate a sunrise to gently wake you up, or to simulate presence) or sync with TV for a poor man's ambilight.
You not liking new features doesn't mean nobody does. As the saying goes, everyone only needs 20% of Excel, but everyone needs a different 20%.
I do have a SonosBeam2 now that's ARC'd on the TV. It doesn't work on WiFi (crappy engineering), but connecting an Ethernet cable is not too much to ask.
In the future, I want to use dumb speakers.
2) Get a bunch of raspberry pi zeros with a hifi hat.
3) Put picoreplayer (https://www.picoreplayer.org/) on them.
4) Use the material skin (https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material) so it doesn't look like 1995.
Congrats, you now have your own, fully open source, sonos equivalent for multi-room synced audio. Supports all major streaming platforms as well as a local library.
Unbelievably frustrating software decisions for otherwise excellent hardware. My favourite(?) part is the “Sonos net” independent network which takes over when one speaker in a group is connected via Ethernet, taking the rest off wifi silently and creating a dedicated wireless network. Then when you connect Ethernet to another speaker in the same group it loses its shit silently, creating and destroying new wifi private networks in an unending cycle, without any notification or visibility in the app. And speakers on a Sonos Net network announce and are discovered differently than spec, which adds a hop and breaks any other subnet connections in a way which is _very _ hard to debug.
And that’s just the setup. My partner and kids use them strictly as airplay targets, and refuse to use the app or voice assistant because of the UX and bugs.
If I didn’t have 5k sunk into the hardware already I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
When you attempt to connect it to a _new_/unrelated structure/home, it connects fine, because the phone sends that information to the camera directly. When you try to add it to your existing Nest home, it attempts to be "helpful" by connecting it with an "assisting device," and invariably fails.
It fails with an arcane NC013 or NC024 error, and instead of falling back to a manual setup option, it just... cannot be added. They legitimately suggest that you add it to a new "structure" (which operates under a separate Nest Aware subscription), and then migrate all of the other devices over to the new structure. Which isn't reasonable, when I have a dozen of these things, some of which are mounted in very out of the way places.
And worse, it can still fail, randomly.
It's as if the "Nest network" becomes corrupted in some indecipherable way. This was exacerbated by Google murdering dead my Nest Secure alarm system, which was _also_ an assisting device, which took my locks offline. And when they shipped a Nest Connect wifi adapter, I _also_ couldn't onboard _that_ device to the home for the same reason, so I now have a separate structure called "Connect", which features... just my locks. And now, the camera I was trying to add back.
It's absolute unforced errors and complete madness.
My experience building out a Sonos system for onboarding wasn't too bad, but I have had Sonos Amps fall offline and do weird things, and it personally annoys me that TruePlay doesn't work on Android. This shift to a new app that doesn't hit parity, and seems to do the original things the S2 app did markedly worse... woof.
In my case, I use a Google Apps email account so my family has a shared email domain (and I can better handle tech support and manage my kids’ use). That’s slowly become completely incompatible with nest and any consumer hardware or services, and that process of integration degradation was incredibly frustrating.
Google consumer software/hardware is dead to me now, I just can’t use it even if I weren’t holding a grudge.
Though it still has warts and opportunities for improvement, our house mostly runs on Unifi (for networking and security cameras.)
It’s good hardware, just let us use it.
(Also please ship a PoE++ adapter.)
First, I plugged it in via ethernet and my entire network went down. The second I unplugged it, it worked again. Unifi have a dedicated help link in their UI that's displayed next to any Sonos products. I followed the instructions on Unifi's website, made a few ethernet cables for my wireless speakers, disabled WiFi on everything, and it no longer broke. Progress.
Then I tried to adopt it to my system with my Google Pixel and the app hung. I repeatedly tried, both ethernet and WiFi, no joy. Called the helpline and was walked through factory resetting and tried many more times. It just hung at "Adding Sub Mini...".
After a long slog I gave up. I borrowed my dad's iPad the following day and it worked first time.
The entire process was opaque,I had no idea why it failed. Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more - and definitely won't recommend.
But I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind last night and it sounded pretty amazing.
This is horrifying and hilarious at the same time.
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/18930473041047-Best-Pr...
Fair play to Unify for making this page in the first place, and making it easy to find for their users. It clearly and rightfully shifts the blame to the right party.
But wow. How many other examples are there of one org's incompetence leading to unnecessary support load for other companies and they have little choice but to provide the workarounds and fixes themselves.
Only recently, but yes.
They used to, though. I have sixteen Sonos players of varying vintage, from the ZP90 to an Arc and almost everything in between, and of those only the Roam and the Move (portable by design) were supplied without network cables. Even the sub-woofers can be plugged in. However I’ve just checked the spec of the recently launched Era 100/300 models - not portable - and indeed, they lack even a built-in interface. Ethernet dongle costs extra. I’m chalking that up as yet another “screw you” from Sonos’s product management to its customers.
And that's how they get you.
Makes me wonder if the horrible setup process is intentional to emotionally lock you in. Once you get it working, you don't want that effort to be for nothing.
I have a network of them around the house. Incredible sound quality for the price, but the setup experience was utterly terrible.
Thankfully, I can just use AirPlay day-to-day, so I don't really need to deal with the software too often, but I prey it continues to work so I don't have to.
If it starts to break down? Honestly, I'd just pull the trigger and replace the entire thing. I hate the software that much.
Despite wanting to act as an active layer 2 device there is almost no configurability, management, or monitoring available. A couple of years ago, in a spectacular product management insult, Sonos also intentionally removed much of the built-in port 1400 interface that provided device-level insight such as log messages revealing this misbehaviour.
The solution is to treat them like hostile guests and shove all Sonos players into a wholly private broadcast domain just for them, to avoid fucking up the rest of your network. And don’t let them join your regular SSIDs.
I am almost certain that there is no-one left at Sonos who understands their own network stack.
Compounding all this is a general smug attitude of “our customers are idiots” which is pervasively apparent from the CEO, through their product management, to their frontline support staff. If this fiasco tanks the company, it’s ultimately due to their own shitty, arrogant culture.
Add a hifi-berry card for optical or phono out, and connect to the amp in each room.
Also I have a pi which I can connect with cable to a Bluetooth speaker and power it with an Anker battery - take that out into the garden on a nice day. Takes multiroom to a new level :-)
So he calls me up every few months to help him with IT, and I go to his business and sit in his office and do his printers and whatnot, no questions asked and nothing in return except maybe a free red bull.
The #1 issue, of all, is Sonos. This thing is a total piece of fucking shit, holy moly. I've never seen a worse piece of garbage than Sonos. This thing is beyond insane.
What I've done is written out is a 61 step series of actions he can take to try and get it to work. He has 7 speakers in his retail store, and they randomly go out, and it ruins the vibe he wants. The moment they go out and the 61 steps don't work (which we have built over years of trial and error) he calls me, and I change my entire schedule to get over there for 4 hours to help him. What a terrible, malevolent, awful, maniacal, disgusting piece of garbage Sonos is. Hate, hate, hate this piece of shit.
- Portable (i.e. bluetooth + battery)
- Loud (as it's predominantly used in my workshop and on the deck - hence portable)
- WiFi support because bluetooth is annoying for connection-sharing. Spotify Connect is predominantly how I like to connect & share.
I looked into Sonos long and hard, and it looked like a complete mess. For the price, it simply couldn't be justified.
Ultimately I couldn't find something that met all my requirements for the price. So I just bought a UE Hyperboom. 20 hours of battery life + USB Power + Optical & 3.5mm Audio in. I bought a M5 Audiocast from AliExpress that provides WiFi Spotify Connect capability.
But now there's almost nothing coming out. Chromecast Audio feels like an ever shrinking ever less available technology. And there just aren't any alternatives in the running!
but i think the damage has been done at Google the resource move to other projects while the legal cases got worked out.
one time Google was going to release Google surround sound that works with Google TV but this courtcase delay it all.
Only issue is they are usually advertising their bluetooth at all time so anyone in the street can connect to them by mistake. I just power them off when not in use anyway so no big deal.
I do have to switch inputs between Chromecast Audio and the computer that's plugged in. That's annoying. And I'd rather have Chromecast alike built into the amp like Nexus Q showed. At the very least these chipamps could offer me a 5v1a for powering my Chromecast. There are a couple fancy semi-expensive amps that do have Google's audio casting, but they're big-ish fuller-sized receivers and honestly expensive.
This setup I have has been kind of portable, but mannnn I don't love it. I literally have a chipamps velcroed to the side of a speaker. There's a 6s lipo for the chipamps and a USB battery bank for the Chromecast, plus cables for both power supplies. Audio cables from Chromecast to chipamps to speakers. I've gone long on making this a portable useful anywhere system and it rocks.
The one simplification is using some powered speakers. Micca PB42 and Neumi BS5p both will self-power off the 6s lipo batteries, are ~$150.
But it's just absurd & wild that speakers with networked audio are so un-mainstream. That I had to velcro this package together myself is absurd. How has the ecosystem only narrowed and narrowed? (Meanwhile Sonos is busy committing deep-cut enshittification/de-networkization).
https://www.ryobitools.com/products/details/33287187102
No wifi but your phone can do spotify over wifi->bluetooth->speaker.
I've got plenty of Ryobi Tools but always wrote off tool vendors when it came to audio.
I'm reading up on this M5 Audiocast product and I'm failing to see how it's anything other than allowing you to stream music to a device via WiFi in stead of Bluetooth. Extra dongle, cables, connections and yet another app for no benefit that I can see.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but when I'm with friends or family, there's usually a speaker somewhere connected to a phone, and that phone is playing tunes. Someone is in charge of the phone and what is playing. Rarely do we care what is playing though because that's not why we are together. If someone wants to share a specific song they like with the group, they can either play it from the "DJ" phone, or just connect their own device to the speaker and play.
Possibly I'm just a 34 year old boomer and I don't understand how the kids like to party these days.
With Bluetooth, the relationship is Phone streaming directly to the speaker. This places a full dependency on the phone and results in some major issues (IMO).
- With bluetooth you're severely limited by range (between phone and speaker). If you wander off to the bathroom or other end of the house you'll most likely experience degradation, stuttering or disconnects. So your phone must be near the speaker at all times.
- Bluetooth is taxing on phones, sacrificing battery life.
- Bluetooth is painful to share with. Even on the Hyperboom Speaker that has 2x Bluetooth channels. You can't just hand over connectivity to someone else easily.
Spotify Connect changes the relationship drastically and therefore experience. Your phone instructs the Audio Player (M5) to connect to Spotify directly, removing the dependency from your phone. Since the Audio Player will connect directly, this reduces load on your phone and you're free to wander off. It also allows anyone else with a Spotify account to take control of the connection without messy bluetooth disconnect/connect events.
It's just better in all regards IMO.
What about the recent issue with their intention to sell their customers' data? No, Sonos, your business and products are garbage.
I never saw a page with 1000 or more "partner", but can't be long ..
> JetPunk tops the pile, listing 1,809 “partners” ... 20 websites from publisher Dotdash Meredith—including Investopedia.com, People.com, and Allrecipes.com—all say they can share data with 1,609 partners. The newspaper The Daily Mail lists 1,207 partners, ...
I think of that whenever someone is angry about cookie banners. Like, that was just happening before without me knowing.
Now when I see that, often I just leave as this site is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed article is written here... nothing valued is here.
Things You Should Never Do Part 1:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
It's ridiculous how many problems the new app has. I'm talking about just basic functionality:
- Speakers will randomly disappear from your system, with no trace of it in the UI, even though the speaker is showing itself as connected with a solid white light.
- The system itself will randomly disappear from the app.
- Some boolean toggles in the app literally don't do anything -- they never change, no message comes up, nothing. There is no toast, no popup, nothing.
- Other toggles will slide over and then immediately slide back and reset itself, no error message or anything. Sometimes this happens immediately, other times it happens only after you exit the screen and go back. There is some major state fuckup.
- Resetting a device and reconnecting it will often cause it to reconnect in a half-connected, "unregistered" state. Then it'll show you a large "Fix it" button that literally doesn't do anything.
- The close buttons on their suggestion cards ("Add a voice assistant", etc.) don't actually work. There's no way to get rid of them at the top.
- Resetting it again and again and again will sometimes get it back to the system. Often not. This literally changes day by day, suggesting some serious backend instability (overloaded endpoints? who knows). Been struggling with this for 2 weeks now, and some devices will connect some days but not others.
- Trying to connect a new device will sometimes cause your phone to try to connect to the device's own WiFi peer to peer, but the app is so dumb it doesn't realize this is happening, and behind the modal it goes into various "disconnected" UI states because it can't reach the other speakers anymore (since you're on the device's wifi, not your router's).
- Some devices use NFC to pair themselves, but that pathway is broken and never succeeds. Instead, you have to use a printed PIN hidden on the bottom of the speaker to pair that way. But how do you enter the PIN? First you have to say the NFC isn't working by clicking the "Need help?" button, but all that does is show you a video about how to do the NFC by holding the phone just right. But that's not the issue, but that there's a separate codepath after you pair with NFC that bugs out and never finishes connecting. To enter the PIN, you have to push that same "Need help?" button over and over, and then eventually after seeing the same help video enough times, it'll let you enter the PIN. Then chances are it will finally connect, but the end up in a "Unregistered" state like above, with a useless "Fix it" button.
- Even when you think you finally got a system fully connected, it'll often stall at the last step, "Finalizing connection", with a loading spinner that lasts several hours. It never times out. It never finishes. You can quit the app and reopen it and sometimes the speaker will be half-there ("Unregistered"), other times it will be completely missing. The speaker itself will show a white light and think it's connected. It's lying.
- Many change operations in the UI, such as room renames or grouping or volume changes, optimistically update clientside but then never actually reach the server and the things don't actually change. They just spring back to what they were before at some point in the future. There's no confirmation when a change succeeds. There's no error message when it fails. There's just fake UI states that sometimes but not always reflect the reality of the backend settings.
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I've owned like 10-12 Sonos devices over the years. I never had any (lasting) issues with the old app. UX was never Sonos's strong suit, and their app was always on the bad side of average, but at least once you set it up it usually kept working. Sure, it'd have the occasional downtime for a few minutes every few months, whatever, but it was never enough to complain about. I loved my system, as it kept me sane through COVID.
The new app changed all that. Sonos went from one of my most beloved brands to something I will absolutely not spend money on ever again. And it's not because they released a botched update. It's because they're run by an arrogant, incompetent CEO who refuses to see the severity of the problems, doesn't want to invest the effort to roll it back, and instead lays off a hundred people below him.
I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, and because I work in web, I know bugs exist and network problems happen and I'm usually pretty forgiving about them.
The frustration here is the absolute callousness towards their customers, this "too bad, just deal with it" attitude while multi-thousand dollar systems sit unusable. His apology rings absolutely hollow when months go by and I still cannot even finish setting up my system (which worked fine for years previously).
Never in my 30+ years working with software and hardware have I seen such malevolent incompetence. This is the single worst ecosystem I've ever had to use. My $20 el cheapo Wyze cameras work infinitely better than this. My smart bulbs, which I stopped using because they were so unreliable, were 100x better.
My god, I'm sorry for going on such a long rant... but I can hardly contain the sheer anger I feel at this utter mismanagement. They really need to fire the CEO and install someone who actually gives a damn about the users, whatever the costs.