dug 
So, having coffee on a Sunday morning grateful for a 10-minute slice of Scottish weather where it’s not raining.
Listening to FIP on the radio and reflecting on how happy I am now I’ve gotten rid of my Sonos system. It’s a diabolical product in that the hardware is lovely and very premium, but the service design is abysmal. Basically, most / all of the design choices made by Sonos are about protecting their walled garden and this has consequences.
In the end, we grew tired of constantly fighting with our expensive music system so we could listen to what we wanted to where we wanted to.
Product architecture choices which led to me listing my “Play 1s” and “Connect” on Gumtree:
- Devices can only be remotely controlled via Sonos app
- Machines and mobile devices on local network cannot be exposed as virtual Sonos devices (as in supporting a heterogeneous network of ‘soft smart speakers’)
- Access to radio stations is limited by design (only works if station has created a Sonos endpoint/plug-in only 20% of my stations did this)
- Sonos software penalises services that are not cloud-based (like Plex) with delays and poor error handling/messaging
- System can only be accessed via Wi-Fi (WTF?!?) I turn my Wi-Fi off most of the time unless I’m actively connecting to a network. “Everyone has wifi all the time” is an un-challenged assumption that lost them a customer
- System cannot interact with other remote (aka Bluetooth) speakers/devices. Effectively, the Sonos experience is a ‘destination’ you have to commit to going to rather than an ‘ambient’ service that gives you easy access to your music
There are more finicky ones but those were the deal-breakers (not in any particular order).
</rant>