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.