A possible plan to bring back the old Sonos app has proven impossible, according to the company’s CEO.

The idea came about after widespread problems with the new app forced Sonos to publicly apologize and delay the launch of two new hardware products…

A brief summary of the chaos

Back in May, Sonos launched the Ace, the company’s first headphones, which are intended to compete with the AirPods Max.

To support these features, the app needed to be updated. The company decided to use this as an opportunity for a fundamental rebuild and released a completely new app just before launch.

That didn’t go well. Customers were upset because the company was removing popular features, and many owners of older Sonos speakers were experiencing connection issues and lag. Given that the whole idea of ​​Sonos is based on an Apple-like “It Just Works,” customers were understandably angry with the company – even more so when it turned out that accessibility was also being compromised.

Sonos initially downplayed the complaints, but CEO Patrick Spence subsequently apologized to customers via email and announced a timeline for fixing the problems.

Old Sonos app cannot be retrieved

Even the promised bug fixes for the new app didn’t satisfy everyone, and last week it was reported that the company was discussing the idea of ​​bringing back the old app.

However, Spence said in a Reddit AMA that was discovered by The edge that this turned out to be impossible.

The trick, of course, is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and also in the cloud.

In the months since we launched the new mobile app, we’ve updated the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where S2 is less reliable and stable today than you remember.

After extensive testing, we reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the issues worse, not better. That’s certainly disappointing. For me, it was disappointing.

Photo by Lukas Hellebrand on Unsplash