> Why is there a technical need for a cloud service?
oAuth? I suspect a primary need for a cloud service is to just handle authentication with music services.
In theory you could do it entirely locally, but then you would run into super weird and dangerous (from a security perspective) situation where the redirect leg of the oAuth would need to point to a local IP address or similar.
I imagine it is possible to work around these issues, but it would be a huge faff, and would be very hard to make it as slick as a cloud based system.
Ultimately most consumers just don’t mind signing up for things. So why make your engineering 50% more complicated for a tiny minority of your target market.
On the contrary, it's really quite easy to run a NAS and do all your music locally, and it's very easy to make it "as slick" as a cloud system. Millions of people are doing this already with products like Plex.
I’m not saying that running a NAS is hard. I’m saying that most of Sonos customers don’t run a NAS, they use something like Spotify.
The number of Sonos customers that are really interested is a local only setup in the music streaming age is vanishingly small.
I run a NAS, Plex, and even had a local music collection. But I’ve ditched it for Spotify. I simply can’t be bothered to deal with the faff. When I want music, I want it to work first time every time, not a 1% chance that something brakes that require 30mins of my time to fix.
>Millions of people are doing this already with products like Plex.
That's fair up to a point. Plex doesn't require network access, but if you want to use it, even with just local media, you still need to register an account with them, and usage data for local media is sent to them.
Which is why I don't use Plex.
Any device/app that requires you register/give access to usage information in order to utilize local resources is an intrusion of my privacy.
Please note the word requires above before replying to my comment.
oAuth? I suspect a primary need for a cloud service is to just handle authentication with music services.
In theory you could do it entirely locally, but then you would run into super weird and dangerous (from a security perspective) situation where the redirect leg of the oAuth would need to point to a local IP address or similar.
I imagine it is possible to work around these issues, but it would be a huge faff, and would be very hard to make it as slick as a cloud based system.
Ultimately most consumers just don’t mind signing up for things. So why make your engineering 50% more complicated for a tiny minority of your target market.