Josh Hendrickson
In our last episode of “You don’t own your platform-supported gadgets,” we told you the scintillating story of Sonos and its plan to cut off support for legacy speakers. The good news, the company, partially reversed course. The bad news is that it means you’ll have two Sonos apps in the future. One for your legacy speakers and one for everything else.
Sonos has continually supported some devices for around a decade. And the hardware in those speakers is outdated and slow. The company wants to move forward, but until recently, a speaker system functioned as “one speaker,” which limited what the Sonos could do with new hardware.
For owners of our earliest products, we want to provide more details on what to expect for your system later this spring. Learn how we’re extending the life of your products and innovating for the future with a new app and operating system, Sonos S2.
— Sonos (@Sonos) March 17, 2020
So Sonos announced it would drop support for legacy speakers. They would get bug patches, but no new features. And the company would let you split off those speakers into their a separate group so your newer devices could get new features.
In a blog post today, Sonos explained how it would accomplish the feat—a new app. In June, the company will release a Sonos S2 app for newer speakers. The app will provide new features, updates, and bug patches. If you prefer, you can continue to use the original Sonos app (and you’ll need to for legacy speaker), but it will only see bug patches.
And thanks to the two apps, you can split your systems into legacy and new. Just remove your newer devices from the legacy app and add it to the Sonos S2 app.
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because Philips Hue did the same thing with its Hue bridges. And the company recently announced it would stop updating the original Hue app altogether and cut it off from the internet. So there’s something to look forward to for Sonos users.
via Sonos
