This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just as a way to soothe the outrage about this POS of an app: A fair share of the problem can be minimised by using Home Assistant and Music Assistant to control the Sonos devices. This way you very rarely need to actually use the app anymore.
Which is good because it's indeed shit.
Are the speakers themselves good though?
They sound decent. A bit overpriced honestly by the time you add in the sub and enough speakers to setup a nice 7.1 you can buy something less fidgety and save a lot of money.
Their security is bad. They're vulnerable to people screwing with them. If you're on the network, you can ask their webservers to do whatever you want, there's no auth. Their networking protocol is kind of bad. They need a LOT of ports open to communicate with each other. Their discovery is iffy. If you put one of the speakers on ethernet, they'll mesh the rest of the speakers and use that one speaker to lower latency. but if that speaker reboots or updates, the rest of the speakers go nuts and dissapear for a while.
They don't allow bluetooth playback. They don't always show up for casting from Plex. They keep forgetting my wife's apple ID. They don't allow you to use a custom name for the alexa integration. The mic on the beam is so hot, that other alexas on the same floor will always defer to it, it's very bad at hearing you over it's own sound.
Having other people on the network mess with them sounds kinda fun, but I think I'll probably skip on account of all the other issues.
Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a "closed system" as Sonos.
Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app
I haven't had any luck with Music Assistant and my Sonos speakers. :(
I can add and select the speakers, select a track, everything seems to work right up to the point of actually playing music. It just stays paused and never switches to playing, no errors either.
Golden parachute successfully deployed.
$1.8M is pretty small as golden parachutes go. Was probably the smallest amount allowed under his employment contract which avoids a lawsuit.
To paraphrase OP's body text, if I did a shitty job I wouldn't be receiving $1.9M checks in the mail.
i don’t know if any of you lot have experienced the sonos app firsthand, but let me tell you that it is worse than you could possibly imagine. it takes ages to open, has a million buttons, and pretty much all of them are useless. it has a play/pause bar on the bottom of the app that does not go away. if you want to change your speaker settings, that’s hidden away in a menu (within the app) called “system settings”. why would they call it that?
the app makes you type in the wifi password when pairing a new speaker, even if that speaker has the ethernet cable plugged in. the app also doesn’t support certain wifi passwords so i had to change my wifi password before connecting my speaker.
Like I'm a programming dullard but they had to go out of their way to filter out allowable WiFi key characters? I don't see why they'd even bother...?
maybe they were afraid of bobby tables
The worst thing they've ever done is remove functionality from the desktop app and have it exclusively in their mobile app.
I love the idea of Sonos. Being able to have whole house audio without having to run a shit load of cabling would be a dream come true, except they do it so badly it is often a nightmare.
Holy shit, this is quite the list.
I have an easier time using my Home Assistant dashboard to control my Sonos devices rather than the native app. Takes forever to load in Sonos but with HA, it’s near instant.
As a Sonos user, yea - I hate the new app. The biggest annoyance is how long it takes to start up, because I don't have an IR TV remote I need to use the app to change the volume (or stand up and use the volume control on the side).
Damn, I'm in the wrong business. Been making really bad decisions for free
Obviously. You could be the next Phil Harrison. Failed with Atari, got picked up by MS to lead Xbox. Failed with Xbox One, got picked up by Google to lead Stadia. Failed with Stadia and is currently keeping a low profile because he probably understood that failing any higher than Google is going to be a long shot.
He’ll probably show up at Ubisoft or EA, lol.
Or maybe even back at Microsoft to lead their handheld launch.
People like this clown really live in a reality of their own. Imagine being horrible at your job, just to be paid a fat lump of money
If I got that payout, I'd be able to retire...
Give that amount of money to anyone with the most basic of simple financial management and they wouldn’t have to work a day in their entire life while living a very decent life. Almost $2M at 5% growth, below the total historical performance of the stock market, is $100,000 per year for doing nothing except sitting on money. Any amount of that which is reinvested compounds exponentially.
The Peter Principle in practice. A Quibi exec is taking over for him, I shit you not.
Quibi
I'd forgot about that. Ha.
Quibi?! The streaming company whose business plan was so bad it lasted like 6 months. That sure inspires confidence.
Said another way, the company that broke production just hired the guy who ran the backend of Pandora Radio for 10 years and not once did he make headlines for an outage.
I feel like they couldn't make things much worse apart from just making the app say, "Lol, fuck you," every time you tried to do anything.
It's so bad, I've mulled just trashing the one speaker I have that I didn't even pay for, just to move to something better.
I just grabbed the old app from The Aurora store and told my speakers not to update their firmware.
I wish I could be such a PoS where I join a company, propose a massive investment into something, see it's failure and firing a bunch of staff, then bounce with a nice severance package to join a new company to repeat that over and over again.
Honestly the biggest issue is the rinse repeat part. Anyone can fuck up. But they just get to do it all over again because they have no shame.
Boards and executive suites are filled with people who repeatedly ruin companies and then just do it to the next one.
people who repeatedly ruin companies
You mean those bold leaders who have the rare ability to take risks* and make the tough decisions**?
** The decisions that will hurt people they don’t care about and won’t have to deal with, in order to hopefully make their “number go up” score improve.
I had 7 Sonos speakers. 2 months after they updated their app I sold them all and replaced them with the Denon 150s. I was such a Sonos booster and loved their products. Now they are a dead company to me.
Sonos basically failed their way out of me ever buying their shit. I bought a Wiim pro and am still using my Samsung soundbar from a decade ago. No complaints.
I am glad most of my devices couldn’t be upgraded to S2 anyway with the size of clusterfuck that turned out to be.
They freaking removed SMB/NFS playback. That’s like 90% of what I listen to.
