Sonos can’t bring back its old app to save you from its new broken one

If you’ve got Sonos home audio speakers and gear and have been frustrated with the company’s new updated app, which has suffered from major bugs and performance issues, you won’t be too impressed to learn that a fix doesn’t seem imminent.

Sonos released a brand fully updated app in May to coincide with the release of its first headphones, the Sonos Ace. It now appears that the app was far from ready, with many users unable to use many functions on their speakers, including even being able to play music.

This week, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence was part of a Q&A on social media site Reddit where he said though Sonos wanted to re-release the old app to offer users a temporary fix, this was not going to happen.

“... 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,” Spence said.

“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 [sic] 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.”

This is not the news Sonos fans wanted to hear. For more than three months many have had huge problems with their Sonos systems, and fans took to Reddit to comment directly to the CEO.

“When did this window close and why wasn’t the rollback decision made sooner than that?”, one said. “You were “hopeful” to release S2, but didn’t make it a priority? It’s not a silver lining that you’ve burnt the boats, it’s an even bigger failure with seemingly no accountability.”

“It is really hard to believe on that,” said another. “I’m a software engineer with a pretty extensive experience both software and hardware development on major companies, way bigger/broader than Sonos. There is no such thing as “we cant rollback”. You do have the option to provide an update on the current app”.

Sonos users have taken to Reddit and the official Sonos forums to report a myriad of problems with using the new iPhone and Android app including music not playing even though it appears as playing in the app, volume controls not working, pairing speakers in groups not functioning, and having to reset the Wi-Fi router just to get the Sonos system to connect.

The ongoing problems have seen Sonos’s share price tumble in recent weeks to nearly half its near-$20 high in March.