The feature parity problem
When Sonos or any app ships a v2, users revolt. Features vanish, interfaces change, and suddenly the thing you relied on daily feels stolen. You never really own your software.
Originally published june 2024 on stijnbakker.com
Apps are becoming public property. At least, that’s how it feels to users.
When Sonos launched their redesigned app, people hated it. Features disappeared. Familiar UI patterns changed. Something they used every day was suddenly alien. The Dutch public broadcaster did the sam, moved from a decent app to a horrible one. Both companies said the same thing: “It took courage. We needed a stable foundation for the future.”
Users didn’t care about foundations. They cared that their thing was broken.
This raises two problems nobody talks about honestly.
The first is technical. We like to say software can be molded over time. Iterate, improve, ship. But sometimes a codebase is so far gone that a complete rebuild is the only option. And rebuilding means starting from scratch. Which means losing features. Achieving feature parity with the old version is brutally hard and expensive, especially when the old version accumulated years of small additions that nobody documented properly.
The second is cultural. Designers get bored. Engineers want to work on new things. A product that’s been stable for years feels stale to the people building it, even if users love it. I suspect the Sonos redesign wasn’t driven purely by technical necessity. Someone wanted to make something new. The problem is that “new” for the builder means “broken” for the user.
And underneath both problems sits a deeper truth: as a user you never really own your software.
Every app you depend on can change overnight. An update you didn’t ask for can remove the feature you relied on most. You have no say, no vote, no recourse. You’re at the whims of whoever controls the update cycle.
That’s the feature parity problem. Not just the technical challenge of rebuilding without losing functionality. But the uncomfortable reality that the software you shape your life around doesn’t actually belong to you.