The decision to move the core functions of the Sonos app into the cloud proved to be disastrous for the audio company, which not only lost a lot of money trying to fix the many problems, but also had to lay off many employees.
That said, The Vergereported less than a week ago that Sonos was considering re-releasing the old app in an attempt to prevent more customers from giving up on the company’s products.
Unfortunately, that won’t happen because Sonos has already rolled out several driver updates for its audio products that seem to be incompatible with the old app now.
None other than Sonos CEO Patrick Spence confirmed the information during a Reddit AMA. According to him, it’s not just the old mobile app that must be fully compatible with its Sonos audio products, but also the software that runs on the speakers and in the cloud.
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 than 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.
Spence also reiterated the company’s commitment to fixing the new app, which forced Sonos to delay the launch of two major products. He’s stated that he’ll return to Reddit to offer more details about what’s coming to the new app and respond to the “most upvoted questions.”