Did they switch apps again, or is this still about the debacle when they switched from their original app to the second gen (S2) app many many years ago?
Because while that was a shitshow, that's ancient history by now. Did they screw up another generational switch?
Yep, there was a big update mid last year. They didn't orpahn any players this time, and a lot of people hate the UX but that's pretty subjective and people fear change, so lets ignore that. What they did that's not subjective -
- Wreck some folks systems so that they can't add new devices or discover their existing ones.
- Force everything to go via their cloud servers, which adds round-trip latency and server-reliability problems to everything you try to do
The latter one there means that, for instance, if I try to use the app to change volume or skip a track then it might work, or it might take several seconds and then change the volume, or it might not do it at all. Maybe you press the button again ... Then after thirty seconds it might apply all the interactions and skip half an album or get deafeningly loud.
But also the app may just not load properly, with half the interface staying blank. It may claim to have started the music but nothing's actually happening. It may not load the state of the speaker so you can't see what's playing or control it. It might not list all the speakers. Early on after the release we also got lots of tracks that would fail half-way through and skip to the next one.
It's an absolute shitshow, and when people started to complain they were told the problems were clearly with their network setup and that they were at fault, even though everything had been fine before. They started saying things like "Oh starlink isn't really supported because of the latency it introduces", which was only a problem because of their decision to make the whole system terminally online.
Because while that was a shitshow, that's ancient history by now. Did they screw up another generational switch?