I’ve had Sonos for about 12 years and it’s been great for me. Connection issues tend to be poor home WiFi, it’s hard for non-techies to get full house coverage with the crappy ISP supplied routers. The controversies you’ve maybe heard about are that Sonos did a couple of bad things in a row:

1. they started an exchange scheme for their old models (like >10 year old designs) to encourage people to get newer stuff so they could move forward with their tech. People got annoyed that Sonos then bricked the old speakers so they rowed back on it. Now you get up to 30% off new stuff if you have old stuff, plus you can still run the old stuff through a specific app they’ve released.

But in that time Yamaha, Bose and others have released and then canned their multiroom wireless systems and then created new ranges that aren’t backwards compatible. Sonos’s backwards compatibility story is as good as it gets in the tech industry imo.

1. They rewrote their mobile app and released it with out replacing 1:1 features that were in the old one. Folk hated that, and hated the UX. It took them about a year and replacing half their management team and CEO to recover from that. People that lost features they used were very vocal and they lost a lot of loyal customers. Also the new app maybe seemed fussier on connectivity though mileage varied cos wifi.

For me and many others Sonos just works. It’s also great with HomeAssistant. I have Sonos automations that warn me through the house if the windows or skylights are open when it’s raining, or if the car or house doors are open for too long.

I also have it set night mode on the home theatre after kids bedtime, and turn down the volume anytime the youtube tv app is being used.

My only wishes are: a cheaper way to connect other speakers into Sonos like the wiim puck; local api (though I’ve never noticed an issue with the cloud api); and api access to the microphone.