The New Sonos App Is So Bad, the Company Might Bring Back the Old One

August 17, 2024:

The newest version of Sonos’ mobile app is still very bad—so bad, the company is considering ditching the newly redesigned version of the app and bringing back the older version. This news, reported by The Verge, comes along with reports that Sonos is also laying off 100 employees. Indeed, not a great time for the swanky speaker company.

Things first went awry for Sonos when it released the new version of its app in May. It was met with almost universal disdain. Users found the new app format made it difficult to connect to a network, queue up songs, or even change the volume. One of the key complaints was that many of the accessibility features in the legacy app were either poorly implemented in the redesign or removed from the platform entirely. Some users say the app is nigh unusable for blind Sonos owners.

Sonos has at least acknowledged its blunder since the bungled rollout, but the company has yet to fix many of the issues at hand. CEO Patrick Spence has said the fiasco may cost the company upwards of $30 million and has led to it delaying two new hardware products.

Hence the potential frantic backtracking to a version of the Sonos app that actually worked. It isn’t clear whether Sonos will actually let users switch to the previous app version or when such a capability will be available. For now, Sonos users will just have to keep slogging through it.

Here’s some other news from the world of consumer tech this week.

BMW Uno

Great news for anybody who loves the card game Uno and also owns a BMW: You can now combine both of those interests without worrying about losing cards beneath the floor mats.

Uno Car Party! will let riders play Uno together in the vehicle, using a combination of their own phones and the display screens on the car’s dashboard. The new feature—coming to the BMW X3 and select Mini models on August 21—is a joint effort of the game company Mattel and the cloud-based game service AirConsole. This is the same partnership that brought the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? quiz game to BMW cabins a couple of years ago.

It’s sure to be good fun, but just know that you can’t play card games while driving down the road, lucky for all the other humans and robots on the road. Save it for ferry rides.

Browser Hell

Descend into Hell via Google Chrome, because Diablo is playable on a web browser now. This capability comes via a fan-made, open-source project called Diabloweb that is available on GitHub. The game includes the 1997 Diablo, along with its expansion, Hellfire. It takes a teensy bit of setup (you need to download the game and run it locally), but before long you’ll be able to hack and slash some demons on just about any browser you choose.

Sure, it’s not quite as impressive as running Doom on a pregnancy test or strain of gut fauna, but being able to smoothly play one of the most renowned video games right there in your browser is still pretty nifty.

Starlunk

Starlink, the satellite internet division of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, plans to start offering direct-to-cell access, which will beam its connectivity to cell phone users in a partnership with mobile provider T-Mobile. Other cell providers like Verizon and AT&T don’t seem to like that development very much.

This week, Starlink’s competitors filed petitions to deny Starlink’s efforts to implement its cell service with the US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates how satellite internet is distributed in the US (and beyond, once the satellites are up there).

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