627
Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
627 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
60488 readers
3512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Just as a way to soothe the outrage about this POS of an app: A fair share of the problem can be minimised by using Home Assistant and Music Assistant to control the Sonos devices. This way you very rarely need to actually use the app anymore.
Which is good because it's indeed shit.
Are the speakers themselves good though?
They sound decent. A bit overpriced honestly by the time you add in the sub and enough speakers to setup a nice 7.1 you can buy something less fidgety and save a lot of money.
Their security is bad. They're vulnerable to people screwing with them. If you're on the network, you can ask their webservers to do whatever you want, there's no auth. Their networking protocol is kind of bad. They need a LOT of ports open to communicate with each other. Their discovery is iffy. If you put one of the speakers on ethernet, they'll mesh the rest of the speakers and use that one speaker to lower latency. but if that speaker reboots or updates, the rest of the speakers go nuts and dissapear for a while.
They don't allow bluetooth playback. They don't always show up for casting from Plex. They keep forgetting my wife's apple ID. They don't allow you to use a custom name for the alexa integration. The mic on the beam is so hot, that other alexas on the same floor will always defer to it, it's very bad at hearing you over it's own sound.
Having other people on the network mess with them sounds kinda fun, but I think I'll probably skip on account of all the other issues.
I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app
Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a "closed system" as Sonos.
Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
I haven't had any luck with Music Assistant and my Sonos speakers. :(
I can add and select the speakers, select a track, everything seems to work right up to the point of actually playing music. It just stays paused and never switches to playing, no errors either.
That very much sounds like a network problem.
Are both hosts in the same subnet?
Yeah. I did see in the docs that there can be issues with Unifi networks, which I have, or with special setups but I did try a few of the settings it mentioned with no luck.
The only thing "special" with my network is I'm using a 10.x.x.x/8 subnet mask. The part that confuses me is the speakers are added with no issue.
Have a look at mDNS. It's very often the issue here.
I am using the same network - that’s no problem
I have to ask the stupid question but are they in pause? What if you hit the button on top?
When they removed the ability to listen to my local music library from the app I started looking for alternatives. Seemingly perfectly timed for the app to shit itself.
I found BubbleUPnP. It can cast to all of my Sonos and my Google assistant speaker with zero issues and can play from Plex, my phone's local library, and my NAS. Highly recommend. Three free version is usable but paid is only $7 and I no longer need the Sonos app.
If you use home assistant take a look at music assistant, it solves a lot of these issues for free.
I wasn't able to get anything Google to work with Sonos. I originally had Spotify but cancelled when I couldn't afford a bunch of subscriptions, and switched to my local stores music - which Google also refused to cast easily.
I’ve had my Sonos sound bar controlled by HomeKit since the day I bought it and have never needed to fuck with their app.
I guess I got lucky?
Sadly you still need that POS to intially configure it and the occasional update.
No I didn’t actually.
I’ve never bothered with the app.
I just use airplay and let HomeKit handle it and have had absolutely 0 issues with it.
My appleTV discovered it and provided it to HomeKit and I was done.