In the 10 years I've owned them, I've used the app less than 10 total times. I much rather prefer just using them as an over priced surround system and use my Playstation to play music through the TV/sonos.
I would not buy or recommend new Sonos products now. Occasionally I do think about adding to my setup but since the update debacle that's no longer an option. Over the years my Sonos has been pretty reliable, and very importantly, the wife and kids can use it easily. We just want "Play X in Room Y." It works very well for that. Even my nerdy self is OK with that... I have plenty of other things to nerd/worry about and I just want my music to play.
I did have a period of instability after I moved some Sonos speakers around, and I must say their tech support was pretty good (this was maybe four years ago). They looked at my logs and told me it was a weak signal issue, which I thought was ridiculous and initially dismissed... but after digging some more and troubleshooting my home signals, it turns out they were right.
Old Sonos with old S1 app is still great for me! It really pains me to see how far they have fallen.
As a long time apartment/condo dweller, Sonos basically can't do what I'm looking for.
For me, the major thing that matters is that I can see a device in spotifys device list and can play to that device. Similarly, it needs to be zero setup for anyone else on my wifi network (wife, kids, friends). WiiM covers that perfectly.
Granted, there is some work there if you don't already have speakers. I personally think Spotify is a great product. I just don't want my speakers running an operating system. I have speakers as old as 25 years that work perfectly with the WiiM. No point in adding additional tech in a speaker that works perfectly as-is. My biggest worry (which Spotify has been pretty good about) is that the speakers work over WiFi and at some point, will be sunsetted. Maybe not within the next few years, but I don't have much faith that a Sonos system will work well in 10-15 years.
It was super cool when it all worked but if it took them this long to get rid of that CEO, then I don't seem them turning around at any point soon.
I don't know what makes them different, or if they are just that popular that I'm seeing the noise, but it's something that I'd personally dig into more before investing.
But the app they released last year is an unreliable clusterfuck, and while you don't need the app for things like tv audio, if you want to stick an album on in your shed while you do some carpentry (one of my use-cases recently) then you're probably going to want to use it. And right now that's very hit or miss.
So I think a little bit of wait and see is probably the right choice. If they get good again and drop the moronic everything-goes-through-our-cloud approach, I'd have no hesitation in recommending them again.
But my setup is just Beam + Ikea Symfonisk for surrounds. Planning to add the sub mini later on.
My guess is the issues start to occur the bigger your setup and if you heavily use the app? I havent touched the app since setting it up.
We're on starlink, which is great but adds some latency to some stuff, and the new app has been terrible - barely loads, claims to start playing but nothing happens, volume adjustments take random amounts of time or may be ignore, all sorts.
But also when not using the app (just watching tv) the surround system is still pretty perfect.
I only have them in one room, so I can’t comment on multi-room audio.
I'm happy with the form factor, audio quality, and overall TV experience, and I honestly haven't used the app enough to even notice if there was a big update.
That said, I haven't used any Sonos multi-room functionality. But I have noticed weird gaps in functionality with the Arc's Amazon Alexa integration. The Arc doesn't support moving audio to it from other Alexa speakers, or vice versa. I have to imagine they deliberately disabled this, as if I'm going to replace all my Alexa devices just to get Sonos multi-room audio working!