So it's been about six weeks since Sonos pushed out the new app, and I want to talk about it, because I don't think I've been this mad at a piece of consumer software since Windows 8 tried to make me use tiles.
Quick background if you missed it: Sonos replaced their entire app in early May with a ground-up rewrite. Not a redesign, a rewrite, which in hindsight explains a lot. I've got a Beam soundbar in the living room and two old Play:1s doing stereo duty in the kitchen, and I've been a pretty happy Sonos person since around 2016. The old app wasn't fast, it wasn't pretty, but it worked. You could set an alarm, you could see your queue, you could search your local music library while half-asleep and it would just find the song.
The new one couldn't do any of that for weeks. Alarms were gone entirely at launch. The sleep timer vanished. Queue management, where you could drag a track to play next, just wasn't there. And this is the part that actually made me angry rather than just annoyed: they broke accessibility. VoiceOver users, people who rely on screen readers to control their speakers, lost the ability to use the app at all in any reasonable way. That's not a missing nice-to-have, that's locking people out of hardware they already paid for.
I tried to set a sleep timer on a Tuesday night, around 11, half asleep on the couch, and just gave up and turned the soundbar off at the wall like it's 2004. That's the whole story of this app in one sentence.
Patrick Spence, the Sonos CEO, did an interview a few days ago where he basically admitted they shipped too early to hit a deadline tied to the new Ace headphones launch, and that a chunk of the missing functionality would be coming back "over the summer." I appreciate the honesty, genuinely, more companies should just say "we messed up the timeline" instead of pretending a broken app is an intentional design choice. But "over the summer" is not a great answer to give people whose kitchen speaker can no longer play music on shuffle reliably, which, yes, is also currently broken for some folks depending on which thread you read.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and it's not a popular one to say out loud: I think this happens because companies optimize app releases around internal metrics and hardware launch dates instead of around whether the thing works for the person standing in their kitchen wanting to hear a podcast. Nobody in that org, at any point, said "hey, wait, we can't ship this without a sleep timer." Or somebody did say it and got overruled. Either way, the result is the same. A piece of hardware that was working fine got worse through a software update, which is a genuinely strange thing to be mad about but here we are.
Unrelated tangent, but it happened this same week and it's been rattling around my head: Nvidia briefly passed Microsoft to become the most valuable public company in the world, something like $3.3 trillion in market cap, on the back of basically one product category. I don't have a tidy point to make about that next to the Sonos thing, except that it's a weird moment in tech where the company making the chips that train the models is worth more than almost anything else on earth, while a company that makes wireless speakers can't ship a working alarm clock. Both of those are true on the same calendar week and I don't fully know what to do with that.
Anyway. I'm not switching to Sonance or building out a Home Assistant setup with cheap Bluetooth speakers just yet, mostly because I already own five Sonos units and the sunk cost is real. But I've stopped recommending Sonos to anyone who asks, which I used to do constantly. If you're thinking about buying in right now, maybe wait until the fall and see if the alarms come back first.