Sorry, Sonos fans – the old app isn’t coming back because it’s too buggy, ironically

The previous Sonos app won’t be as good as you remember, says Sonos’s CEO

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If theSonos 2024 app updatewere a new car launch, by now it would have run over a whole bunch of puppies, taken out a bus shelter full of seniors and slammed into the local orphanage, bursting into flames and taking the building with it. Just last weekSonos admitted that it was considering bringing back its older app, S2, as a stopgap measurewhile it continued to fix the newer app, which it launched in May 2024. But in a Reddit AMA, CEO Patrick Spence says that option is now off the table.

Spence was posting onr/sonos, where he said that “Everything has been on the table in terms of finding the fastest path to fixing your systems. In fact, 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.”

But having investigated the idea in detail, the company has concluded that it isn’t doable – and the reason it isn’t doable is because of, er,Sonos.

Why can’t Sonos bring its old app back?

As Spence explains, “Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too.” And that software and cloud has been changed since the new app was launched, which has affected the old app “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.”

In fairness to Sonos, people who remember S2 as a golden age of app reliability and stability are perhaps misremembering: when the new Sonos app leaked in April 2024,we hoped that it “might just fix the S2 app’s many problems”. As we said back then, “For some people on the internet, this update has been a long time coming. The Verge shared links to posts from theSonossubreddit of people complaining about how terrible the S2 app is.”

It’s a moot point, though: S2 isn’t coming back, and Sonos will continue with its fortnightly update program to fix bugs and resurrect missing features. You can see theroadmap for app updates on the Sonos website here.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.

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