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Sonos CEO says the old app can't be rereleased

63 points by JimDabell 2y ago

ProofHouse 2y ago
Sonos is great hardware PERFORMANCE, but UX on hardware and software is top 3 most infuriating unusable products I’ve ever owned. Will never go back. Wanted to be like apple, one button. I lost days trying to sync and years lost probably in stress lol. Low IQ incapable teams or bad management to put out things like that into the world in my opinion. Can’t figure what else it could be. Terrible 1 star. Could’ve been 5 and if it was intuitive I’d have been loyal for life to that brand.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
donmcronald 2y ago
> In the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what you remember. Most post-sales updates have negative value for consumers. More ads, more features that we don’t want, and more bugs.
- nopassrecover 2y ago
  This is a super insightful point that is obvious in retrospect and explains so much.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > more features that we don’t want 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%.
  - jitl 2y ago
    Yeah, the Hue updates have made the system work much better, and the app itself has improved 100x from the earlier generation
  - bananapub 2y ago
    and yet, this has culminated with Hue requiring accounts on their website for lights to be controllable at all, in another display of corporate sociopathy.
DelaneyM 2y ago
I am an experienced engineer with twenty five years of infrastructure and protocol development, and my experience setting up an all-Sonos home system is a _saga_ of epic proportions. 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.
- disillusioned 2y ago
  Unrelated, but similarly, I am in a weird form of hell in the Nest/Google Home ecosystem, where trying to re-add a camera to my home fails because it cannot successfully connect with the "assisting device" in my home to fetch the wifi credentials from. 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.
monero-xmr 2y ago
There is a local business owner I really like, and he honestly has no idea who I am or what I do, which is crazy he has never googled me, but that's because he's authentic. And I am his IT support, even though this is totally insane. Think like a guy who owns a UPS store equivalent. Super nice guy, goes to my church, I really like him. 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.
- pistoleer 2y ago
  ...and you do this for free?
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    He’s my friend
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  You could always go full circle. But that would be rated PI
- farawayea 2y ago
  Wouldn't it be cheaper to just replace the 7 speakers with something else?
- gegenschall 2y ago
  I love that you're doing this for free; I've done similar things in the past and learned that at some point you may be doing people a disservice by keeping old systems and broken implementations alive for free. I'd call it vendor lock in by generosity. Or, tongue in cheek: had the business owner paid for support for those Sonos boxes, he probably wouldn't have them anymore.
samwillis 2y ago
This is a really good summary of what's technically changed inside the Sonos system, and how it's caused a lot of these problem: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-technical-analysis-andy-pennell-wigwc https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn... 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.
- akdor1154 2y ago
  Web devs replaced the systems engineers?
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    They made shareholders very happy by replacing all those expensive in-house employees with cheap outsourced labour. Sadly, nobody knew that there was more than one type of coding bootcamp. That's how they ended up with the React crew for a bare-metal job.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      > replacing all those expensive in-house employees with cheap outsourced labour. ... they ended up with the React crew for a bare-metal job 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.
- ttul 2y ago
  Ahhh so that’s why my system started sucking in May. I actually started looking at replacing everything. I hope their CEO is losing sleep.
_trampeltier 2y ago
"We and our 843 partners store and access personal data .." I never saw a page with 1000 or more "partner", but can't be long ..
- eesmith 2y ago
  "Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data with over 1,500 Companies", Wired, 3 months ago, https://www.wired.com/story/cookie-pop-up-ad-tech-partner-top-websites/ https://www.wired.com/story/cookie-pop-up-ad-tech-partner-to... w/ 3 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39835704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39835704 > 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, ...
- bnferguson 2y ago
  I've somewhat regularly seen around 1400 show up. Which is just.... wow. 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.
mgartin 2y ago
I run a self hosted server of Squeezebox and have 10+ players around the house. The hardware is long discontinued, but can be bought second hand. I can stream Spotify and internet radio. Very happy with it. Connect the Squeezebox Touch via toslink to active speakers etc.
- blipvert 2y ago
  I run a squeezebox server, but with raspberry pi clients running squeezelite. 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 :-)
pharos92 2y ago
I was recently in the market for a speaker. Had an odd set of requirements... - 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.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  It's ghastly to me that Google seems to have just given up. There were a bunch of portable speakers coming out with Chromecast. JBL Link in 2017, for example. I have some Sony gear from around the same time (fine speaker, fine Chromecast, but some truly godawful bad wifi connectivity). 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!
  - chabad360 2y ago
    They were sued by Sonos for patent infringement.
    - bingobob 2y ago
      yeah Sonos won for a bit there Google keep at it and overturn it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910694/sonos-google-patent-verdict-thrown-out-alsup https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910694/sonos-google-pa... 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.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Honestly whenever I am looking for speaker these days, I reuse some inexpensive HiFi speakers for the second hand market and plug an amp from aliexpress/amazon with bluetooth capabilities. 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.
malermeister 2y ago
1) Put LMS (https://lyrion.org/ https://lyrion.org/) on your home server/a raspberry pi. 2) Get a bunch of raspberry pi zeros with a hifi hat. 3) Put picoreplayer (https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/) on them. 4) Use the material skin (https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material 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.
- bingobob 2y ago
  https://music-assistant.io/ https://music-assistant.io/ is also another option
  - malermeister 2y ago
    Oh nice, I'm already using HA and embedding LMS in an iframe. Might be worth a look. Have you used both? If so, how do they compare?
wilted-iris 2y ago
I tried Sonos once and ran far, far away. My rule ever since has been that I buy dumb speakers and attach the networked audio device of the day. Today I'm using Wiim streamers, used to use Chromecast Audio, briefly ran an OSS stack. That's the only way to have power over companies in this scenario: I can swap out the networked bit anytime with a minimum of cost and waste.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  Huawei gifted me a SonosOne when I preordered the P30. The SonosOne has no Bluetooth, the voice assistant failed to set timers and the networking was unreliable. Sold it off. 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.
55555 2y ago
There's no reason to use Sonos anymore. When Sonos came out, I bought them because 1) I wasn't sure which speakers were good, and 2) Sonos would allow me to have a multi-room audio setup. Regarding #1, it turns out that speaker technology doesn't seem to advance much. Many audiophiles seem happy to buy literally 30 year old speakers. The Sonos Play 5 has not changed it's speaker internals significantly since 2014 IIRC. Regarding #2, Airplay 2 means that you can just buy any airplay 2 enabled speakers and use Apple Music or Spotify or your iPhone to cast to all of them at the same time (sync'd) and set varying volume levels. 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.
- antimemetics 2y ago
  I have a Phillips Hue and they now want to force me to create an account - for security reasons. 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.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > but a device that does nothing else but emit coloured light needs a frickin account for SECURITY reasons? 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.
bingobob 2y ago
https://music-assistant.io/ https://music-assistant.io/ Music Assistant is a music library manager for your offline and online music sources which can easily stream your favourite music to a wide range of supported players and be combined with the power of Home Assistant!
qnleigh 2y ago
Does anyone have any insight into how something so obviously broken can be released by such a large company? I'm honestly just confused how large companies with such immense resources put out such buggy software so consistently. Am I underestimating the complexity of a system like Sonos?
katzinsky 2y ago
[dead]
farawayea 2y ago
I wouldn't want Sonos even if they gave their products away for free. They like to stop supporting their devices and turn them into e-waste to force customers to buy their newer products. It's a speaker. It should play music until its hardware fails. It should certainly not stop working because someone decided they want more money. What about the recent issue with their intention to sell their customers' data? No, Sonos, your business and products are garbage.
waterpowder 2y ago
Tangentialy - has anybody ever managed to see their Sonos speaker as sound output on Ubuntu?
duxup 2y ago
They violated a very important rule. Things You Should Never Do Part 1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
hkchad 2y ago
I'm still using the S1 app and MUCH prefer it. I did end up running a 'split system' so I could use some of the newer products but the majority of my sonos use is still with S1 and wish they all worked on it.
solardev 2y ago
This is such a load of bullshit. So they upgraded some speaker firmware or cloud code or whatever. OK, so roll that back too. The entire new system is utter, complete crap, and the CEO should be resigning in disgrace, not just saying "oh, sorry, we already changed some stuff so rolling back is too hard." Unacceptable. 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. ------------------------- 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.

63 points by JimDabell 2y ago

Sonos is great hardware PERFORMANCE, but UX on hardware and software is top 3 most infuriating unusable products I’ve ever owned. Will never go back. Wanted to be like apple, one button. I lost days trying to sync and years lost probably in stress lol. Low IQ incapable teams or bad management to put out things like that into the world in my opinion. Can’t figure what else it could be. Terrible 1 star. Could’ve been 5 and if it was intuitive I’d have been loyal for life to that brand.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

donmcronald 2y ago

> In the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what you remember. Most post-sales updates have negative value for consumers. More ads, more features that we don’t want, and more bugs.

nopassrecover 2y ago
This is a super insightful point that is obvious in retrospect and explains so much.
sofixa 2y ago
> more features that we don’t want 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%.
- jitl 2y ago
  Yeah, the Hue updates have made the system work much better, and the app itself has improved 100x from the earlier generation
- bananapub 2y ago
  and yet, this has culminated with Hue requiring accounts on their website for lights to be controllable at all, in another display of corporate sociopathy.

DelaneyM 2y ago

I am an experienced engineer with twenty five years of infrastructure and protocol development, and my experience setting up an all-Sonos home system is a _saga_ of epic proportions. 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.

disillusioned 2y ago
Unrelated, but similarly, I am in a weird form of hell in the Nest/Google Home ecosystem, where trying to re-add a camera to my home fails because it cannot successfully connect with the "assisting device" in my home to fetch the wifi credentials from. 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.

monero-xmr 2y ago

There is a local business owner I really like, and he honestly has no idea who I am or what I do, which is crazy he has never googled me, but that's because he's authentic. And I am his IT support, even though this is totally insane. Think like a guy who owns a UPS store equivalent. Super nice guy, goes to my church, I really like him. 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.

pistoleer 2y ago
...and you do this for free?
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  He’s my friend
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
You could always go full circle. But that would be rated PI
farawayea 2y ago
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just replace the 7 speakers with something else?
gegenschall 2y ago
I love that you're doing this for free; I've done similar things in the past and learned that at some point you may be doing people a disservice by keeping old systems and broken implementations alive for free. I'd call it vendor lock in by generosity. Or, tongue in cheek: had the business owner paid for support for those Sonos boxes, he probably wouldn't have them anymore.

samwillis 2y ago

This is a really good summary of what's technically changed inside the Sonos system, and how it's caused a lot of these problem: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-technical-analysis-andy-pennell-wigwc https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn... 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.

akdor1154 2y ago
Web devs replaced the systems engineers?
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  They made shareholders very happy by replacing all those expensive in-house employees with cheap outsourced labour. Sadly, nobody knew that there was more than one type of coding bootcamp. That's how they ended up with the React crew for a bare-metal job.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    > replacing all those expensive in-house employees with cheap outsourced labour. ... they ended up with the React crew for a bare-metal job 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.
ttul 2y ago
Ahhh so that’s why my system started sucking in May. I actually started looking at replacing everything. I hope their CEO is losing sleep.

_trampeltier 2y ago

"We and our 843 partners store and access personal data .." I never saw a page with 1000 or more "partner", but can't be long ..

eesmith 2y ago
"Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data with over 1,500 Companies", Wired, 3 months ago, https://www.wired.com/story/cookie-pop-up-ad-tech-partner-top-websites/ https://www.wired.com/story/cookie-pop-up-ad-tech-partner-to... w/ 3 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39835704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39835704 > 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, ...
bnferguson 2y ago
I've somewhat regularly seen around 1400 show up. Which is just.... wow. 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.

mgartin 2y ago

I run a self hosted server of Squeezebox and have 10+ players around the house. The hardware is long discontinued, but can be bought second hand. I can stream Spotify and internet radio. Very happy with it. Connect the Squeezebox Touch via toslink to active speakers etc.

blipvert 2y ago
I run a squeezebox server, but with raspberry pi clients running squeezelite. 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 :-)

pharos92 2y ago

I was recently in the market for a speaker. Had an odd set of requirements... - 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.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
It's ghastly to me that Google seems to have just given up. There were a bunch of portable speakers coming out with Chromecast. JBL Link in 2017, for example. I have some Sony gear from around the same time (fine speaker, fine Chromecast, but some truly godawful bad wifi connectivity). 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!
- chabad360 2y ago
  They were sued by Sonos for patent infringement.
  - bingobob 2y ago
    yeah Sonos won for a bit there Google keep at it and overturn it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910694/sonos-google-patent-verdict-thrown-out-alsup https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910694/sonos-google-pa... 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.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Honestly whenever I am looking for speaker these days, I reuse some inexpensive HiFi speakers for the second hand market and plug an amp from aliexpress/amazon with bluetooth capabilities. 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.

malermeister 2y ago

1) Put LMS (https://lyrion.org/ https://lyrion.org/) on your home server/a raspberry pi. 2) Get a bunch of raspberry pi zeros with a hifi hat. 3) Put picoreplayer (https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/) on them. 4) Use the material skin (https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material 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.

bingobob 2y ago
https://music-assistant.io/ https://music-assistant.io/ is also another option
- malermeister 2y ago
  Oh nice, I'm already using HA and embedding LMS in an iframe. Might be worth a look. Have you used both? If so, how do they compare?

wilted-iris 2y ago

I tried Sonos once and ran far, far away. My rule ever since has been that I buy dumb speakers and attach the networked audio device of the day. Today I'm using Wiim streamers, used to use Chromecast Audio, briefly ran an OSS stack. That's the only way to have power over companies in this scenario: I can swap out the networked bit anytime with a minimum of cost and waste.

knallfrosch 2y ago
Huawei gifted me a SonosOne when I preordered the P30. The SonosOne has no Bluetooth, the voice assistant failed to set timers and the networking was unreliable. Sold it off. 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.

55555 2y ago

There's no reason to use Sonos anymore. When Sonos came out, I bought them because 1) I wasn't sure which speakers were good, and 2) Sonos would allow me to have a multi-room audio setup. Regarding #1, it turns out that speaker technology doesn't seem to advance much. Many audiophiles seem happy to buy literally 30 year old speakers. The Sonos Play 5 has not changed it's speaker internals significantly since 2014 IIRC. Regarding #2, Airplay 2 means that you can just buy any airplay 2 enabled speakers and use Apple Music or Spotify or your iPhone to cast to all of them at the same time (sync'd) and set varying volume levels. 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.

antimemetics 2y ago
I have a Phillips Hue and they now want to force me to create an account - for security reasons. 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.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > but a device that does nothing else but emit coloured light needs a frickin account for SECURITY reasons? 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.

bingobob 2y ago

https://music-assistant.io/ https://music-assistant.io/ Music Assistant is a music library manager for your offline and online music sources which can easily stream your favourite music to a wide range of supported players and be combined with the power of Home Assistant!

qnleigh 2y ago

Does anyone have any insight into how something so obviously broken can be released by such a large company? I'm honestly just confused how large companies with such immense resources put out such buggy software so consistently. Am I underestimating the complexity of a system like Sonos?

katzinsky 2y ago

[dead]

farawayea 2y ago

I wouldn't want Sonos even if they gave their products away for free. They like to stop supporting their devices and turn them into e-waste to force customers to buy their newer products. It's a speaker. It should play music until its hardware fails. It should certainly not stop working because someone decided they want more money. What about the recent issue with their intention to sell their customers' data? No, Sonos, your business and products are garbage.

waterpowder 2y ago

Tangentialy - has anybody ever managed to see their Sonos speaker as sound output on Ubuntu?

duxup 2y ago

They violated a very important rule. Things You Should Never Do Part 1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

hkchad 2y ago

I'm still using the S1 app and MUCH prefer it. I did end up running a 'split system' so I could use some of the newer products but the majority of my sonos use is still with S1 and wish they all worked on it.

solardev 2y ago

This is such a load of bullshit. So they upgraded some speaker firmware or cloud code or whatever. OK, so roll that back too. The entire new system is utter, complete crap, and the CEO should be resigning in disgrace, not just saying "oh, sorry, we already changed some stuff so rolling back is too hard." Unacceptable. 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. ------------------------- 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.