After initially announcing that Bose will completely turn off all ‘smart’ features in its SoundTouch series of speaker products, the company has seemingly responded to the wave of unhappy feedback with a compromise solution. Rather than the complete shutdown and cut-off that we reported on previously, Bose will now remove cloud support as its servers shut down, but the SoundTouch mobile app will get an update that gets truncated to just the local support functions. Bose also made the SoundTouch Web API documentation available as a PDF document.
The shutdown date has also been extended from the original February 18 to May 6th of this year. Although these changes mean that the mobile app can no longer use music services, features like grouping speakers and controlling playback will keep working. Features such as presets which were cloud-based will naturally stop working.
With the web API documentation made public it remains to be seen how helpful this will be. From a quick glance at the PDF documentation it appears to be a typical REST API, using HTTP on port 8090 on the SoundTouch device, with an SGML-style tag system to format messages. In so far as the community hasn’t already reverse-engineered this API it’s at least nice to have official documentation.
glad that projects like Home Assistant exist. today I hacked my shop’s minisplit AC to add WiFi so I can turn it on remotely (thanks ESPHome).
as for music, I’m still using my dad’s Grundig amp which I also turn on and off with WiFi (this time with ZigBee). in the AUX input, I have a Bluetooth receiver to stream music from my phone. and dozens of vinyl records and CDs if I need to.
say no to cloud enabled devices.
I am going to just reverse the BOSE gear ad roll my own.
I am pretty sure i am smarter than them.
In doing this, BOSE is confirmed a nasty player…. Recreating the sound touch system is not that hard.
So correctly removing the cloud features (which are going away anyway) and providing users with all the information to write third party integrations makes them a “nasty player”?
If only every manufacturer was this “nasty”!
Right? I think this is a very reasonable result by Bose.
It’s a massive win, all id want to add (which is pretty pie in the sky). Is products are sold with clearly demarcated local and cloud features.
And a clear cloud support time line.
I can’t imagine asking for much more.
This is great. I find these from time to time cheap but have passed. Now I won’t.
So the only thing they’re ‘open sourcing’ is their API docs?
Context of the article title is that these changes will enable Open Source projects to be created/updated that can support these via the API. It does not claim that Bose itself is open sourcing anything.
I have two Bose devices and I wouldn’t recommend them. The bluetooth speaker has a built in factory hardwired EQ with way, way too much bass. My QC35 has a built in mic gain that I can’t disable. So when I’m not talking it picks up environmental sounds and blasts them into my mate’s eardrums.
This behaviour should be legally required for any products that get made obsolete, have cloud service withdrawn, or become abandonware – at the very least, the various protections manufacturers enjoy against legitimate reverse-engineering should be voided.