The way I understand it, the employees "yelled" and "screamed" to not launch the app because it wasn't ready: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/it-was-the-wrong-dec...
Leadership ignored them, launched the app anyway, lost a ton of their stock value, and then laid off 100 employees.
I dunno wtf the board was doing at the time, but they should've removed the leader, rolled back the update, apologized to everyone and then worked to rebuild the experience and trust from the ground up. They never bothered with that, instead doubling down on the new app, keeping the CEO, and gradually restoring features. It still hasn't reached feature (or stability) parity with how it was a few years ago. I barely ever use my system anymore because it's so bad. (I really should sell it, but I just don't even want to touch the software to reset it, or try to support the buyer if they run into setup issues... which they will... because it's that bad.)
Apparently they're trying to make some changes with adding advisory boards, etc. But that won't help if leadership doesn't change. It was arrogance that brought them this mess, and the same people are still in charge. https://www.audioholics.com/news/sonos-backpedals https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/sonos-pledges-ch...
Empty promises from people we don't trust is not a way to win back loyalty. It's just lame PR damage control that fools nobody. They've been doing that for months now and the system is still half broken. Every week I run into issues and I've stopped trying to even report them anymore. RIP. I used to love my Move so much =/ At least that will keep working in Bluetooth mode... I hope.
Never going to buy a smart speaker system again. Dumb old cables is the way to go.
> Never going to buy a smart speaker system again. Dumb old cables is the way to go.
Most things with "smart" in the name are never worth the investment.
The audio sync is really hard to get right on homemade setups (I tried).
Sonos really sucks at software, but they get that right. And the speakers are good quality.
There are zero audio sync issues between speakers all wired to the same receiver. You can get an input cable that connects to a headphone jack to make an iPhone resemble a CD player input on the back of the receiver. Also need an apple dongle for phones w/o headphone jacks.
The very mild inconvenience of using different speakers in different rooms to me is very tolerable vs. the horrible experience with my Sonos speaker deciding to stop working or can't connect, forcing updates, etc. when I just want some chill vibe background music.
Have you tried recently? I’ve been playing with music-assistant, snapcast, and shairport-sync on some raspberry pi zeros. Synchronization has seemed to work incredibly well during my experiments.