Sonos Confirms That Its Good Old App Is Never Coming Back

If you’ve also been waiting for the new buggy Sonos app to roll back to the version that actually worked, you’re going to be disappointed. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence confirmed on Reddit that it won’t be able to re-release that.

It seems like the Sonos app drama is never-ending. Its companion app was never great to begin with, but a massive revamp in May rendered it almost unusable. The community’s reaction to the app was harsh. Sonos apologized for the mess and promised to do better. It even delayed two of its product releases scheduled for later this year so it could focus on fixing the app.

Keith Nieves, the social media program lead for Sonos who goes by the Reddit username KeitFromSonos, has been running an Office Hours segment on Reddit, where he invites a new special guest each time. Tuesday’s guest was Patrick Spence, who was confronted with the ongoing app crisis. Spence confirmed that “Everything has been on the table in terms of finding the fastest path to fixing your systems.” But he quickly confessed, “Until very recently, I’d been hopeful that we could re-release the old app (S2) as an alternative for those of you who are having issues that we’ve not yet resolved.”

Here’s the justification behind it that he provided.

“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.”

Sonos is still on track to release the software updates it planned until fall. It vowed to work on volume responsiveness (consumers complained that the app didn’t have a numerical value for volume), overall system stability, and general UI-related issues in August and September. The Reddit post mentions that the next software release is scheduled for next week. This update will specifically focus on two areas: improve reliability so we don’t have to set up devices that have already been set up on the app and attempt to lessen the number of “Something went wrong” errors.