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Sonos sound systems are fantastic and ushered in some awesome technology that we didn't have when they really started to get off the ground in around 2013. I ha

Sonos sound systems are fantastic and ushered in some awesome technology that we didn't have when they really started to get off the ground in around 2013. I have had the full home theatre from them for around 5 years now and it sounds excellent. You could go from playing music in one part of the house, playing TV on the home theater, to playing music from Spotify across the entire house all through one app. The problem, is that their app lets them down. It was on the front foot when it was first released because it combined TV audio, with 100s of other streaming services linked together in the one app. But it has now become slow and difficult. Sonos hardware is excellent and the features are still excellent, it's just the execution of those features in the app which have become degraded.

solardev 2y ago
To add on to that, the new app is so bad that I still can't connect my subwoofer to the system after the update (worked fine previously). My surrounds randomly disconnect and lose registration (whatever that means). The button to fix it in the app doesn't respond (as in nothing happens when you click on it, like they forgot to implement that action altogether). Streaming services randomly break with no error messages. Devices go out of sync and randomly stop playing through the day. Plus features that used to be there are still missing. The UI changes are a mess too, with sliding drawers that can't be closed, many screens that don't do anything, error flows that change depending on how many times you've retried the same thing, etc. On top of it all, they removed all async support and you can only call them for help, with several hour wait times and usually no resolution. They just don't care about software UX. Or their users. Part of the problem is that they only sell hardware at a one time price, so they have no incentive to make it keep working afterward. It's the same model that commodity PC makers have, where they have no way to recoup further support and maintenance costs via an app store. Sucks. Now I know to not buy expensive hardware with mandatory cloud functions.

solardev 2y ago

To add on to that, the new app is so bad that I still can't connect my subwoofer to the system after the update (worked fine previously). My surrounds randomly disconnect and lose registration (whatever that means). The button to fix it in the app doesn't respond (as in nothing happens when you click on it, like they forgot to implement that action altogether). Streaming services randomly break with no error messages. Devices go out of sync and randomly stop playing through the day. Plus features that used to be there are still missing. The UI changes are a mess too, with sliding drawers that can't be closed, many screens that don't do anything, error flows that change depending on how many times you've retried the same thing, etc. On top of it all, they removed all async support and you can only call them for help, with several hour wait times and usually no resolution. They just don't care about software UX. Or their users. Part of the problem is that they only sell hardware at a one time price, so they have no incentive to make it keep working afterward. It's the same model that commodity PC makers have, where they have no way to recoup further support and maintenance costs via an app store. Sucks. Now I know to not buy expensive hardware with mandatory cloud functions.