Quick Summary
Sonos had considered bringing back its older app to mollify customers. But CEO Patrick Spence now says that it's too buggy and unreliable due to recent firmware updates.
Six days ago Sonos was seriously considering bringing its old app back to try and satisfy its disappointed customers while it tries to fix the newer one. But the firm has made a decision about whether or not to bring the old app back, and the decision is no.
Speaking to Sonos customers in a Reddit AMA on r/sonos, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said that he's disappointed too. "Until very recently I'd been hopeful that we could re-release the old app (S2) as an alternative for those of you that are having issues that we've not yet resolved," he said. But having investigated it, Sonos has concluded that "S2 is less reliable & less stable [than] you remember... re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better."
Why can't Sonos bring back the old Sonos app?
According to Spence, the problem is that since the new app launched in May 2024, Sonos has been updating the software that runs on Sonos hardware and in the cloud to work with it – and by doing so, they've effectively broken the old app.
The news didn't go down particularly well with Redditors, with responses such as "so rollback the firmware as well"; "suspecting there may be some hidden (business) reasons why you don't want to regress systems to 16.1"; and "someone call the fire department his pants are on fire."
For Spence, "If there's a silver lining here, it's that we are fully focused on getting the new software running successfully in your home."
Sonos continues to spend serious money on fixing its app and restoring missing features, with updates coming out fortnightly. Sonos says that it's had to delay two important product launches, and that the ongoing issues have overshadowed the launch of its Sonos Ace headphones too. There's no doubt that the ongoing issues, now into their fourth month, continue to do serious damage to Sonos's reputation.
