Look What You Made Me Do (Premium)

Sonos has always been a controversial company, but this summer's self-inflicted and easily avoidable problems, which I now call Sonosgate, are the final straw for many one-time fans. This is understandable: Our relationships with ecosystems like Sonos are built on trust, and while trust is something that one builds slowly and over time, a betrayal of this magnitude can ruin everything.

I've been a Sonos fan and a loyal customer for many years: I purchased my first Sonos smart speaker in 2015 after fretting about the expense for years, though I now own about 10 of them. And while there's little reason to recount my history with the platform here, the short version is that I own several thousand dollars' worth of Sonos equipment, use them daily, and have enough experience to speak to the ecosystem's relative value. If you would like to learn more about this, The Lure of Sonos (Premium) is perhaps a good place to start, though I have only expanded my use of Sonos products since then.

My love of Sonos has long hit on that odd emotion/logic divide, but maybe that makes sense: While Sonos spans both audio and video and makes home theater products of some renown, my focus is mostly on music. So much so that I'll be publishing a separate post about music soon, as the original write-up intended for this article grew well beyond the point of common sense. For now, I will simply say that my relationship with Sonos can be viewed as the most recent era in a literal lifetime of loving music. And that the importance of music to me is so strong that I've put up with some Sonos issues that might have otherwise triggered changes long ago.

That is, my love of Sonos is really more of a love/hate relationship. And while that, too, is a long story, I can cut to the chase here as well. Sonos products are expensive, perhaps overly so, and I've always resented that to some degree. There were technical issues, among them a need to solve a reliable connection issue at our last house by purchasing yet another Sonos device, a Sonos Boost, to create a dedicated Wi-Fi network separate from that used by our other devices. And there still are integration issues, such as those caused when Google stole some Sonos technologies, triggering a series of lawsuits, and, worse for customers, the inability of Google's YouTube Music app, which I rely on, to natively control Sonos systems (as was possible with its predecessor, Google Play Music).

I would like Sonos and Google to wrap up that nonsense to benefit their shared customers. But the biggest problem with Sonos, by far, at least until now, is a direct result of the Sonos/Google falling out. Because there's no way to control Sonos with YouTube Music, I've been forced to use the horrible Sonos app to do so instead. (At least on Android; if you're an Apple user, you can control Sonos over AirPlay, which is wonderful.) To be clear, when I say the Sonos app is terrible, I mean the previous Sonos app, not the somehow ev...