I'm sorry for all you Sonos-owners troubles, but I've been quietly enjoying the read, and glad to see you all have been able to make some headway on this.
To document my own journey, I used to be an avid Sonos fan, and had about 9 or 10 devices. Then came the S%%T show (as
@Webheadfred so eloquently put it) in May of 2024, where Sonos basically hosed all functionality on the app by forcing you to S2, and basically made controlling devices or playing music from locally stored music libraries completely useless. I gave them a month or 2 to see if they would fix/revert, and when it only got worse, I decided to ditch Sonos completely because of no longer having confidence in their vision for a path forward. I ended up selling most of it (kept 1 x Play:1 for testing), and started playing with a couple of different alternatives, namely Bluesound, Bose and WiiM.
I ended up replacing my entire setup (and more) with
WiiM. Compared to Sonos, it works remarkably well, is stable, always available. Sounds quality is on par, and surpasses in some cases. When I was running into constant connectivity issues even with a much simpler setup on the Sonos equipment, WiiM had absolutely zero issues with the same exact environment. WiiM has grown with me as my networks changed and got more complex, and they haven't missed a beat (no pun intended).
Like I mentioned, ever since Sonos' appocalypse, I have tried seeing how things were going off and on throughout their promises to make things better using my Play:1. I can tell you, their S2 app was ridiculously bad, and still had major disfunction a year+ later. When they added the functionality to allow you to downgrade your equipment and app to S1 again, that was the magic moment when things started working reliably again.
There are also some fantastic threads dedicated to this on Reddit and even Sonos' own community forums, and nobody has ever really been able to pinpoint or come up with a solid fix. It always fascinated me that there were so many people out there with crap tons of varieties of different networks and hardware out there all experiencing the same problem. The standard point-the-finger blame game response that Sonos fanbois always continue to repeat is "iTs yOuR nEtWorK"... or "just go through and reboot your router when this happens", or "you just need to go around and factory reset all your speakers every day". Cracked me up, and so glad I didn't have to deal with all that.
So my advice to you... downgrade to S1 if your equipment is capable (not all newer equipment can), but that would literally fix 99% of your connectivity issues and other functionality problems. Just wanted to share my pain... and give my 2 cents.
