Sonos’ interim CEO is on a media blitz as he angles for the permanent role. The corporate world is cruel: I wish him the best of luck and hope he continues to enjoy guiding Sonos in their new chapter.

Read on for details on the latest beta release of Bops (v2025.5.1-beta+2567), which includes a new settings page for Sonos speakers that shows latency metrics to help you understand the performance of your Sonos system.

Sonos is learning about home networks

One theme that jumps out to me from these recent interviews is that Sonos seems to have previously expected way more from our home networks than they should have:

The second category of lingering issues is… an older player or some kind of esoteric networking reality in their home.

I don’t want to suggest this isn’t our problem to solve — but the root cause there is the only infrastructure in their home that wants to talk on their local network at very low latency in a sort of mesh is Sonos.

It seems like they lay the failure of last year’s “S3” update at the feet of some sort of mismatch in their expectations around network reliability and performance:

No reasonable person would’ve shipped the software if we had understood the reliability and performance characteristics of the product in our customers’ homes.

I’m glad to hear that Sonos is learning about the performance of their devices in our homes. I’m also glad to hear that they’re taking responsibility for the problems we’ve all experienced with their devices. But what kept them from understanding the performance of their devices in our homes before? How were they ever providing reasonable support?

In my experience, being able to reasonably isolate the performance characteristics of end-users’ devices and networks from the performance of your service is an essential element of providing reasonable support. If you don’t have the ability to do this in some fashion, your support staff spends years alternating between chasing ghosts and blaming real problems on users’ networks. Ohhhhhh. Sound familiar?

Upon reflection, it is no wonder we’re all this upset: we all have WiFi speakers and a mobile app built by a company who as recently as a year ago believed the network was reliable!

Tools like https://github-debug.com have been essential in helping GitHub effectively communicate with users about network performance problems, and I’ve long thought something similar was necessary for Sonos. Today’s Bops release is a step in that direction. A little more about that in a moment.

How will Sonos use this new knowledge about our networks?

We just have a much more profound understanding of the complex networking environments of our customers’ homes. They live in apartments with literally a hundred access points competing for Wi-Fi signal strength on the same channel. They have surprising and esoteric network configurations that you wouldn’t imagine.

It’s great to hear this positive, forward-looking reflection about Sonos’ collective growth. I wish it weren’t couched with an excuse, again passing blame to the “esoteric” network configurations that are seemingly incompatible with Sonos devices.

Tom is right about one thing here; the consumer networking space is a mess. But so are Sonos’ expectations: they ship speakers with Ethernet ports that require advanced configuration to work properly! The word he keeps using - esoteric - is defined by Oxford as:

intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.

Sonos ships some of the most “esoteric” consumer network devices on the market today

Without getting too deep into the technical details, plugging a Sonos device into a significant percentage of home networks will result in broadcast storms that can ruin the performance of Sonos and possibly other devices. Either luck or advanced configuration of your home network is required for Sonos devices that are plugged into your network to actually function as intended.

Outside of the problems related to Sonos “S3” app launch, I’ve helped a handful of people wildly improve the performance of their Sonos speakers with one weird trick: unplug them all. Every single one of them.

I get it: I have several Sonos devices sitting in my rack, right below my switch. All reason suggests that I should plug them into the switch and performance will improve. But the risks greatly outweigh the benefits. Even if I configure things correctly, as I’ve done before, one of the Sonos settings required to avoid loops has a tendency to, well, turn itself off. I promise, it’s just not worth it; friends don’t let friends plug their Sonos devices into their network. Not with the current firmware.

Today I’m bringing this advice into the interface of Bops for iOS. Sonos systems with no devices on Ethernet will see this badge:


An iOS app screenshot showing a label with the text 'All Sonos devices configured to use WiFi'


Others will see a warning and a link to Sonos’ STP configuration guide.

To be clear: Sonos Ethernet ports do work for some people. In some small number of cases, they work without any additional configuration. I’m not mad if this approach works for you, it’s just not something I can recommend at the current time. Read on to see how you can understand whether or not your Sonos devices are easily reachable from your phone with Bops, whatever connection approach you choose.

A properly configured network is still Not Reliable

Even if all of the devices on a network - switches, routers, and BPDU-frame-emitting devices like speakers - are configured correctly, there are still performance issues inherent in WiFi networks that must be considered when building WiFi devices and mobile applications. One that’s key to remember is that clients on these networks are mobile.

Okay, I’ll admit it: sometimes, when I listen to music, I walk around the house. Sometimes I sit on the patio, or maybe use the grill. Occasionally I play fetch with my dog in the yard. I’ve taken great care to blanket the house and yard with WiFi Access Points, but often there’s a wall between me and the nearest AP. And what’s even weirder is because of how sound works, occasionally I can hear my music from a place where the WiFi isn’t the best. It is more than reasonable that Sonos users occasionally use the app in less than ideal network conditions! The app should help you with this experience and - for example - not show me a volume control slider that will have no effect when I use it.

You know what else I do sometimes? Apply software updates to my WiFi Access Points. When this happens, devices often reconnect to a more distant AP while the closest one restarts, resulting in temporarily degraded response times. Sometimes this fixes itself automatically when the nearby AP comes back online, and sometimes manual intervention is needed.

These issues are a reality on most WiFi networks. Sonos users need help here, not blame or broadcast storms.

Bops’ new Sonos Settings & Performance view

To help people with the reality of home networks, all Sonos households you’ve connected to in Bops now include a new “Settings & Performance” view. This view displays real-time latency graphs for each speaker, updating every second:


An iOS app screenshot showing a settings page with latency graphs for each Sonos speaker


Using this view, you can:

  • Identify speakers with unusually high response times
  • Observe latency patterns as you move around your space
  • Diagnose WiFi connection quality issues
  • Monitor the impact of network changes in real-time

I have a well-tuned WiFi network, and this page has already proven invaluable for diagnostics. For example, earlier this week my Arc soundbar was dropping out of grouped playback. The performance view showed nearly 500ms ping times to the speaker - even when standing right next to it! The culprit? The speaker had connected to a distant access point. A quick power cycle resolved the issue by forcing it to reconnect to the nearest AP.

I hope you enjoy this new view in the Bops app, and I hope it helps you get more out of your Sonos system!