Sonos can’t reinstate old app, so you’re stuck with the broken new one

Sonos has abandoned plans to re-release the discontinued ‘S2’ mobile app in order to temporarily negate the problems caused by its deeply unloved successor.

Amid deep-seated backlash over the disastrous Sonos app release, the company had explored the possibility of bringing back the old app while it goes through the laundry list of fixes and feature additions.

During a Reddit AMA session this week, beleaguered Sonos CEO Patrick Spence told fans that the audio giant had discovered re-launching the old app wasn’t an option after all.

He wrote (via Ars Technica): “The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2, is less reliable and less stable than you you remember.

“After doing extensive testing we’ve reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better. I’m sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing to me.”

That means the wait will go on for a well-functioning version of the Sonos app to accompany its popular speakers, headphones and sound bars. The new app was supposed to gift Sonos users a beautiful visual overhaul with a streamlined user-interface and fast access to their streaming services and playlists.

However, there were a bunch of missing features and plentiful issues with controlling volume, non-loading music libraries, connectivity issues, problems with adding new speakers and grouping existing ones, excessive battery consumption, and the absence of the useful alarm function.

Sonos has published a road map for fixes that stretches to the end of the year, but even that doesn’t get users back to where they were prior to the overhaul.

“We’ve made some painful mistakes these last few months,” Spence told Reddit users. “Part of the hard truth of the last few months is that you’re having experiences with our products that are hard to reproduce in our labs. The feedback you’ve been providing here is helping to make our products better.”