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.
I can confirm, last night my internet was not working, and a sonos speaker started randomly playing an alarm. I tried using the app to disable it but it requires the internet to manage your local speakers. I don't recall this being the case with the early version of the apps.
mDNS is probably the way to go, UPnP is de-facto deprecated (and should be, it's awful) while mDNS is pretty well supported and tends to "just work" most of the time IME. That being said, HTTP and Websockets are a freaking horrible choice for an embedded system. SO MUCH TEXT PROCESSING. The poor little MCUs probably struggle to do that in any reasonable amount of time. Not to mention you probably want to make use of RTP/RFC3550 to get priority for realtime-sensitive traffic (maybe this is less relevant over a LAN, but I'd still at least test it in a few scenarios), something websockets/HTTP are incapable of.
oh wow, SOAP/XML is somehow worse. Websocket is a binary protocol, but you're probably slinging HTTP reqs or JSON over it. The downside is the protocol itself is stateful so you have the overhead of doing an HTTP upgrade + managing a stateful TCP connection. Idk why you would use either of those technologies for LAN-only transports, though I could see it being the best option for talking to the mothership.
I guess that means it's entirely engineering practice or maturity. That just makes me sad :(
I was hoping for something a lot more silly like NASA tapping over the Moon landing tapes. A sort of "We cannot get the old app back because we don't know where it is".
Instead it is the usual case of development in search of a new horizon.
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.
> 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.
> My reading of how mDNS works is that it should suffer from similar problems to SSDP on routers that can't broadcast/multicast between radios
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),
"[...] far more prone to incompatibilities with users WiFi configurations [...]" <- Exactly this! With my Unifi gear, all the configurations that had to be tried out and tested were driving me crazy. From Multicast Filtering (IGMP Snooping), Multicast Enhancment (IGMPv3), Broadcast Contols, mDNS to even the fucking Spanning Tree Protocol on the Switches (STP vs RSTP). How is this plug and play? How are other users even getting anything to work when it comes to multi room and speakers being on seperate APs?!
I've had what I think is this exact problem and it was solved by doing a factory reset on the Ubiquiti controller (I have a pre-production DreamMachine UDM). It only happened once and it was most certainly from a firmware update that corrupted some state/config on the system, probably in iptables forward rules if I had to make an uneducated guess.
I have all speakers on Ethernet to start with. But I also had to put them into the same vlan as my phone, as I could not come up with a firewall config to span multiple vlans. It’s tricky.
I don't see why mDNS would be any less stable than UPnP. If anything, it should work better, as common advice (and these days even router defaults) is to disable UPnP. I'm sure the stack isn't tested as well (after all, the existing stack has been receiving patches for a decade) but if anything I'd expect the new stack to work better once the bugs are ironed out.
Yeh, I don't think it's the tech choice that's the problem. It's the choice to change the tech that has caused this.
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.
UPnP is just a generic discovery+RPC service. The router toggle is just for whether it should expose a service to let apps request temporary port forwarding (mostly used by torrent clients and game servers). The advice to disable it is because that ability is considered undesirable, not because there's anything wrong with the protocol itself.
The cloud integration is the main technical issue.
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.
It's sad to hear that the new app encrypts everything.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Most of that, including remote access, comes from HomeKit or Google Home.
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.
> Most of that, including remote access, comes from HomeKit or Google Home
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.
> 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.
It's pretty simple: in order to control your devices in the same manner as most other smart devices (Matter), you need to spend ~40 pounds on a bespoke Hue bridge, use their app, are forced to sign up for an account, and need to ensure the bridge is always powered on.
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.
You are aware that the Hue ecosystem predates Matter, and Google Home for that matter, and probably HomeKit, by at least a decade, right? And that all recent (at least 5 years) bulbs don't require a bridge, right?
> 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.
You're still missing the fact that the Hue ecosystem and Hub predate Matter, HomeKit, Google Home by more than a decade. Can their bulbs even be made compatible with Matter, physically or are they lacking hardware pieces?
No, the whole thing has not been overblown; you are of course correct that remote access needs accounts, and perhaps there are valid usecases for accounts locally, but requiring accounts for local access is absolutely not reasonable.
If you only have ZigBee stuff (which Hue mostly is), you can use Home Assistant with ZHA and get full local-only control. There are other systems, but I use that. Flawless control, never even installed the Hue app.
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 went to Sonos because I had invested in some Airplay speakers and they just didn't work correctly even though I have an 100% Apple eco-system. Once I went to Sonos, it just worked.
What is the alternative for a networked speaker system that “just works”? And I don’t mean “just works most of the time” I mean really just works out of the box for my non-tech brother and in-laws?
I’d been having problems with Sonos and Spotify for a year or two: Playing a song on Spotify takes 3 tries and about 25 seconds. Always. Playing from Tidal is faster (~5 seconds wait and no retries needed)
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.
> 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought a Sub Mini just last week and it took me about 3.5 hours to get it working.
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.
> Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more
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.
Here's the page. The wired approach worked perfectly for me. Sonos's own networking features seem to introduce infinite loops when mixing wired and WiFi.
The fact that this page exists and the suggestion is to connect your wireless devices physically to avoid weird networking loops is astounding. I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?
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.
> I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
They form a tunnel mesh over that private “Sonosnet” wireless network and each player announces an internal bridge interface via STP, including over any regular wifi they’ve joined and any fixed wire network they’re connected to. That could be fine if it was contained to their private mesh, but it isn’t. Worse, they do it with pre-rSTP weights. Consequently electing their own low-bandwidth wireless mesh tunnels as a forwarding path in any nontrivial switched network. If they’re plugged into a hierarchy of unmanaged/non-STP-enabled switches, this will also form a forwarding loop. Either way, they get congested and start to flap, spewing endless topology change BPDUs, and now your network is kaput.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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!
It seems like easy money to me to be honest but they seem to have given up like you say. Google assistant is declining at a terrific rate too - I asked it what the time was a few days ago and got a Wikipedia definition.
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.
I have some fine $300 bookshelf speakers and tpa3255 chipamps setup in the living room and office; it's great yeah. I tend to think most people will end up with sub-par gear if they try to go secondhand, won't fully appreciate what value you can just buy new just looking at online recommendations in your price range, but if you want to be persistent & picky & eventually eventually snap up a steal secondhand does come up with some buried treasure sometimes.
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).
Tangent, but I'm honestly interested in understanding how you use Spotify Connect and why you prefer it over bog standard Bluetooth or even a wired connection.
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.
No, honestly it's a great question. And I'm well past the age of big parties, I'm 18 months younger than you.
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.
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.
> 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, ...
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.