S2 app won’t be coming to save the day after all
After the messy fallout from the launch of the new Sonos app back in May, Sonos’ community forum and the Sonos subreddit have been bombarded with frustrated users asking why the multi-room music giant can’t just make the old S2 app available again.
Last week it looked like that may well be a possibility as The Verge’s Chris Welch – who is one of the most accurate Sonos reporters – stated that “there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design.”
But those hopes have been dashed by the company’s CEO Patrick Spence, who was taking part on an AMA session on Reddit.
“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 & less stable then what 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.”
To be honest, I’m not sure backtracking to an older – and lets face it, far from perfect anyway – app would have been the magic bullet to ease Sonos’ woes.
Sonos software has been on shaky ground for a couple of years now; in fact, Spence himself stated that “performance and reliability issues that had crept in over the last 20 years and were negatively affecting our customers’ experience,” during a recent earnings call.
And, despite the new app being so widely derided, the updates and fixes made in the past few weeks have improved things pretty substantially, and there’s a roadmap in place to keep launching updates to the new app every two weeks for the foreseeable future.
Sonos is so committed to the cause of making the new app not crap, that it has actually shelved plans to launch a couple of new devices.
One of those products was likely to be the new flagship soundbar to replace the Sonos Arc. Codenamed Lasso, the new soundbar was expected to improve upon the Arc with more powerful bass, Bluetooth audio playback, and completely new speaker technology.
In July, Spence penned an open letter to users, apologizing for the numerous issues the new Sonos app brought with it.
