Sonos CEO admits to insufficient app testing : “We released it too soon”

Sonos extends hardware warranties by a year as act of contrition.

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[darwinosx]

While I appreciate the Mea culpas from the CEO, what I'd really like to see are some timeframes as to when we can actually start to see improvements rolling out. We have a couple of the Ikea branded sonos speakers and they used to work relatively nicely with Home Assistant, but all that's gone haywire since this fiasco. I'd like some idea as to when I might be able to try getting them to play nicely together once again. The incremental improvements to the app don't seem to have changed the HA issues at all.

Why would you appreciate anything from Spence. He is the person responsible for this fiasco. It's amazing that he still has a job. It must be a pretty captive board that he hasn't been fired yet. This is far from the only debacle he has overseen and all resulted in layoffs of Sonos employees but never him.

 

[darwinosx]

You should check out Snapcast. Has both server and client, and does some timing sync for the clients. I run server on my NAS, multiple RPi clients with Amp hats for speakers in different rooms

Get back to us when it does home theater.

 

[darwinosx]

Everything you said.

I'm a Squeezebox user for all the same reasons - the community which is now Lyrion - is amazing.

A note on hardware players that the WIIM products seem to be an excellent option at present, supporting Squeezebox along with a pile of other protocols (like Spotify connect and Tidal Connect along with Chromecasting audio, Airplay and bluetooth) at very good value prices.

A point to note is that the Server software has been open source for a very long time, which along with some talented and committed contributors has kept it stable and adding features for years.
I'll call out Michael Herger specifically, who seems to be a total superhero - seemingly from (past/present?) Logitech, who is omniscient.

That's nice. What about home theater?

 

[darwinosx]

It wasn't just insufficient testing. There is a whole re-arhitecture and I'm sure there are features that are marked as "don't worry about it, we'll do it in phase 2" on the testing plan. Classic "deprecate the old thing but replacement is not ready yet" scenario.

A lot of stuff running through the cloud now that doesn't need to. Creating lag and other issues. I would bet it's so they can harvest users data and sell it. Apparently the price for Sonos speakers isn't enough for them. Ever read their terms of service? Oh boy...