Software making hardware redundant rant!

[FranTastic444]

I’ve built up around $2.5k of Sonos kit over the years and all was well until the senior bods there decided that they needed to scrap the app that controls the kit and build a new one. What a total disaster that project has turned out to be – cost the CEO his job


I only ever used the most basic / standard functions – the ability to play the same music source in more than one location (synchronized) whilst also being able to change the volume for each zone and skip tracks / change playlists. Whether any of these functions will work currently is a total crapshoot. When I fire up the app it will randomly not see / not connect to devices or it will show them but won’t play music. Or it will play music but won’t adjust volume or skip tracks. This is so annoying as the old software was flawless and the system worked really well. On more than one occasion, I’ve had to factory reset the hardware and reinstall to get the app to recognize the devices.

Apparently, the rewrite was needed as the original software was coded in a now effectively obsolete language (vb6, I wonder?) that was getting difficult to support / maintain and wouldn’t handle some of the things they wanted to do with their latest hardware. This being the case, they should have sunset their original app but ended support (so older devices retained compatibility) – but of course Sonos did not do this because they want you to buy new hardware.

As if experiencing this once wasn’t bad enough, I’ve very recently hit a similar problem with Apple and “smart” plugs. Just before Christmas, I purchased a couple of smart plugs that work on the Matter protocol. I configured the first one late last year and it works fine, but when I came to make use of the second one in January, I couldn’t get it to work with my iPhone or iPad. Digging in to matters (see what I did there?) in a bit more detail, it looks like Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that each home will need to have a central Hub (either a HomePod speaker or an AppleTV device) to control a Matter compatible device. This would mean shelling out $100+ to get additional hardware – something I’m not prepared to do. To add insult to injury, I thought I might be able to bypass this problem by using the first-gen Alexa speaker I’ve had for years. Guess what? The early Alexa devices are not compatible with Matter (despite the Matter smart plugs having “works with Alexa” on the side of the box).

[Mouse]

I have been fitting Sonos systems for many years and what made Sonos the best and held off the competition was their app and underlying software which allows 32 zones to play the same thing, in time across a network when in party mode.

However this last year has been a nightmare with clients wanting me to fix their system. Fortunately the failure has gained so much attention than many clients have realised that the problems are not my fault. But the thing that made Sonos great, "The App" they have totally trashed that and trying to drive it and explain how to use it to clients is for the birds.

I keep hoping that someone at Sonos will put the shovel away and stop digging the hole, but as I write this I am looking for alternatives for future installs, since I am not seeing any changes.

It is such a shame when a successful company with a good product, mange to bring about their own demise. What we in the UK call a Gerald Ratner moment.

[Barleymower]

I have been fitting Sonos systems for many years and what made Sonos the best and held off the competition was their app and underlying software which allows 32 zones to play the same thing, in time across a network when in party mode.

However this last year has been a nightmare with clients wanting me to fix their system. Fortunately the failure has gained so much attention than many clients have realised that the problems are not my fault. But the thing that made Sonos great, "The App" they have totally trashed that and trying to drive it and explain how to use it to clients is for the birds.

I keep hoping that someone at Sonos will put the shovel away and stop digging the hole, but as I write this I am looking for alternatives for future installs, since I am not seeing any changes.

It is such a shame when a successful company with a good product, mange to bring about their own demise. What we in the UK call a Gerald Ratner moment.

I tried Sonos out many years ago after I was handed a hard drive with a 1000 albums on it. I thought I could play the albums using s
Sonos and WiFi. I wasn't savvy enough to make it work and sold the Sonos speaker some time later.
I have a Samsung R3 now and that works with my phone.

[Spirou003]

I feel your frustration. This is never pleasant to encounter such a deception from something we used to trust, and suddenly it starts messing it up.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer to stay away from applying updates whenever it is possible, if I don't have any valid reason to apply them. In my experience, at best nothing changes, at worst nothing works anymore. The average balance is in the negative. I actually don't remember any time when I got something good after applying an update I did not ask for, but have plethora of examples where it went wrong. The last example of it that I can exhibit is very recent. My employer pushed an update to my work computer, the update did not report any error but brought a bug blocking any direct logon attempt. Now the only way I can use the computer, is to connect remotely to it. Consequence of the update: until the bug is fixed (no idea when) I'm in unwanted full time remote work.

[phathack]

Years ago I bougt a Network MP3 player called slimp3. It was a playback device and a server package that loaded on a computer to drive the hardware. They came out with Ver 2.0 then sold the company to Logitech. Logitech came out with 3 or 4 different devices then canceled the whole product line.

The Server software was open source and could stream to almost everything, with their hardware the audio could sync with no problems. Then several open source hardware devices have shown up and with changes to the server package you can adjust the sync timing to make devices play in synch, not a fun project adjusting delays 1ms as a time to get devices in sync.

Today the server is public supported open source and any hardware is from a small resellers selling open source hardware on amazon or ebay.

[crfriend]

Also, if the Sonos APIs are published it should be possible to recreate the functionality that you had. This'll take time and talent, but should be possible -- so long as the APIs were published. Else, it's going to be a case of abandoning the old iron and "paying the tax" to buy the new.

On the concept of "Open Source", I suspect the sunset of that fairly soon once IBM's deep pockets and lawyers assail the GNU GPL. That's coming, it's just a question of when. The warning shots have already been fired.

Welcome to the Brave New World. Open Source was great while it lasted; however, it's survival is very, very dicey at the moment.

[Midas]

The problem is caused by the fact that software updates are designed and created by computer nerds rather than real people. It seems to me that they neither know nor care how the user might prefer it to function.

One example of this is seen in the Amazon Kindle app. If you just want to read a book there’s no problem at all. If you want to use a reference book it isn’t that easy. My wife and I do cryptic crosswords and as a reference book use Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary on Kindle, which is dubbed as designed for Kindle. It used to work pretty well but a couple of years ago a Kindle update stopped all that.

The search engine used to take you straight to a category heading of that word. The nerds changed it to one that does no do that, but takes you to every instance of that word (even where it occurs on the middle of another word, or at the end of one). At best it slows you down considerably and at worst it’s impossible; if you search for a short word there are too many results to get to where you want to be.

At first I interacted with Amazon to try and get it back to where it was. Now I’m resigned to its uselessness and work around it as well as I can.

That’s just one of many personal experiences of software updates breaking something that used to work fine.

[kingfish]

I doubt Sonos will ever publish their APIs. It would directly facilitate knock-off development. There may be hackers out there who manage to reverse engineer it, but of course those apps will be insufferably kludgy.

What you're probably going to see is the Auracast standard get leveraged to replace it. And I suspect that Bose is in the process of tooling up for just such an application. My (yet to be fruitful) job search has shown me a number of postings for firmware guys with different fields of Bluetooth experience in recent months. It sucks not having real BTLE GATT or DMA coding experience.

I think it'll be a while before they go after GPL. There's too many people doing open source for the "street cred", that there's a steady stream of "reference code" that's too valuable to just shut down. And It's not just Stallman they'll have to fight. The EFF and just about every Linux distro (besides Red Hat) will be arguing the other side.