Sonos will not bring old app back to life, CEO confirms

Sonos will not be resurrecting its old app to help users who have trouble with the new app.

This is according to Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, who shared the news in a Reddit AMA (via The Verge).

“Until very recently 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,” wrote Spence.

“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,” he added.

The issues Spence is referring to are related to the company’s new app, which rolled out in April but was so bad and riddled with bugs that the company apologized for it in July. The Sonos app is a key element of the company’s ecosystem of home speakers, soundbars, and headphones, and when it doesn’t work properly, it can cause a lot of headache for owners of Sonos products.

In July, the company laid out a plan to fix the issues over the coming months, but apparently things haven’t gone as smoothly as intended, with Sonos postponing the launch of two products until it can iron out all the bugs.