I've had a pair of Sonos Ones in the living room and a Move that travels between the kitchen and the back porch since, honestly I don't remember exactly, sometime around 2019. They've been quietly, boringly reliable for years. Not anymore.
Sonos pushed a total rewrite of its app in early May, and it's been a genuinely rough couple of weeks for anyone who owns their gear. I'm writing this on a Sunday morning after the alarm on my bedroom speaker didn't go off on Tuesday, which is the kind of thing that makes you actually late for something instead of just annoyed in the abstract.
The new app is faster in some ways, the UI feels less laggy switching between rooms, I'll give it that much. But whoever shipped this thing cut a pile of features that people relied on every single day and didn't really warn anyone before it went live. No more sleep timer, which is the thing I use almost nightly to fall asleep to a podcast. Alarms aren't gone exactly but they're unreliable enough now that you can't really trust them. Queue management got simplified into something that barely lets you reorder what's coming up next. Local music library browsing, if you keep MP3s on a NAS like I still stubbornly do, is worse or missing depending on who you ask and which speaker you own.
None of this is a hot take at this point. Forums like r/sonos and the Sonos community boards have been full of this for two weeks straight, and it isn't just cranky early adopters complaining for the sake of it. People with accessibility needs lost screen reader support that used to work fine. That's not a nice-to-have, that's the app becoming unusable for some people who paid the same money everyone else did for hardware that used to just work.
What gets me is the sequencing of it. You don't ship a "modern rebuild" of your app and quietly leave out sleep timers and alarms, features that have existed since basically the first version of Sonos software over a decade ago. Somebody at that company decided a redesign mattered more than parity with the thing it replaced, and shipped it anyway, to everyone, all at once. I get wanting to modernize an old codebase, I really do, we've all inherited messy old software we wanted to burn down and rebuild clean. But you don't make your paying customers the test subjects for that rebuild without asking.
The annoying part is I still like the speakers themselves. The sound out of the Move on the porch is genuinely great for something that size, and I'm not about to rip out three rooms of gear over an app that'll probably get patched eventually. Sonos has already said publicly they're working on bringing missing features back, which is the right move, but "we broke it and we're working on fixing it" isn't much of a confidence builder when the thing you broke is people's bedtime alarms.
Small tangent, but this is also just a bad week to be reminded how much of your house depends on a company's app staying good. My thermostat, my garage door, my speakers, all of it lives or dies by some product team's roadmap decisions, and I have zero vote in any of it. Not new, I know, but it stings more when it actually costs you your alarm on a Tuesday.
If you're thinking about buying into the Sonos ecosystem right now, my honest advice is wait a month or two. Let them patch the sleep timer and the alarms back in before you commit money to speakers that are pretty much useless without their app working properly. I wouldn't return mine, I'm too many years and too many rooms deep into this setup, but I'd think twice before recommending a fresh purchase today.
Anyway. Alarm's back on a plain phone alarm clock app for now, which feels like a small defeat after years of not needing one.