I&#x27;m still using stereo speakers even though the local store seems to only sell single units. They have bluetooth but I don&#x27;t see why they would need to be &quot;smarter&quot; than this.

Good for them! I own two sets of noise-cancelling Bose headphones and a (dumb) speaker, and they&#x27;ve all been pretty solid, and for half the price of equivalent Apple headphones.

Does it though? I&#x27;m using my QC on my phone without any app, just BT. Sure I can&#x27;t adjust all settings but enough to be usable.Also FWIW first step for QC35 support on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgetbridge.org&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;bose&#x2F;?h=bose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgetbridge.org&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;bose&#x2F;?h=bose</a> which is IMHO the way to go.

I recently posted a comment [0] critical of Bose for needing an app, and it&#x27;s nice to see that Bose decided to take a much better approach to end-of-life.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45373200">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45373200</a>

it&#x27;s sad that this is not the default behaviour. hopefully the stop killing games movement will put something similar into law with potentially further-reaching side-effects eventually. Because frankly, sunsetting products like this should be common sense, not the exception it currently is.

A long while ago i heard something (that might have been a urban myth) about Bose putting useless weight into their headphones to make them appear more &quot;substantially professional&quot;. Is that a myth or they have pivoted towards actual quality since early days?

I know sound signature is a matter of personal taste, but FWIW, Bose QCs track the Harman curve pretty well.E.g.: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiosciencereview.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;bose-quietcomfort-45-headphone-review.46500&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiosciencereview.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;b...</a>

no highs — no lows — just Bose

When I bought my Bose QC ten years ago, I tried a lot of brands and found Bose to have the most pleasant sound, very clear&#x2F;neutral. I guess it’s personal taste.

If only their sound signature was a bit better... they went all in on engineering tricks to make things small and cheap to produce, but it shows in their sound quality. Their QC headphones are the best in noise cancellation, and the sound quality is good enough that they&#x27;re my pair of wireless headphones.

I am assuming that the GP was referring to buying these exact speakers second-hand, given how they spoke of the environmental impact.

If I&#x27;m understanding it right, any new speaker you can buy from them will still be dependent of some cloud service.On that case, no, that wouldn&#x27;t make me consider buying them. Because the one I can buy lacks exactly the feature that would make me consider it.

This is going to read like I&#x27;m shilling but: I was so impressed with Bose QC headphones that i stocked up and gave out 7 pairs to my closest friends and family this year for christmas

I used to have an unexplained resistance to buy Bose products. After the hinge of my Sony mx-1000 headphones broke in to two places, I gave in and got a Bose qc. Man, the build quality was insanely good. The sound was really good. And it’s really comfortable to wear. I had changed my view.

Good for them. Makes me more likely to consider buying a Bose in future, not just because I know it won&#x27;t be bricked, but also for the environmental impact of this. Kudos.

This is amazing, and I hope this sets a precedent for other companies. Stuff like this would definitely sway my buying decision, if I know when a product becomes EOL I can tinker with it.

Agree. This is huge. Definitely makes me want to buy more Bose products for my house.

Just to mention: Teufel has been even moving further with their fully open hardware design of MYND [0]. Hope others will follow.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teufel.de&#x2F;mynd-107002004" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teufel.de&#x2F;mynd-107002004</a>

Bose hardware quality is rather low and, and their sound quality is sub-par, while forcing you to pay the Bose brand tax, riding the corpse of Amar around for profit.I&#x27;d avoid, even if they happened to do this.

Exactly this.&quot;Bose blows&quot; is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don&#x27;t blow at all[0]. In fact quite the opposite: this is a fantastic example for other companies to follow. Top marks, Bose![0] What is actually true is that they are opinionated about sound reproduction in ways that a bunch of people don&#x27;t agree with but which in the right context are often effective and enjoyable to listen to.

Ironically this makes me want to buy this discontinued model, not anything currently supported by Bose.

I’m a restaurant owner. Starting February I’m gonna spit in your food before serving it.&gt; Uhhh I’m gonna tell all my friends to stop eating thereI have decided to not spit in your food after all. Praise me.

This def needs to be celebrated and rewarded. I am more likely to purchase Bose now.

Sure but that should be an up front conversation. &quot;OK, how do we make sure as few of these turn into bricks?&quot;

They&#x27;re just publishing API documentation. No source code of the device got published.At least people can create their own implementation of the API tho.

If IP rights make doing the right thing too onerous, we can always reduce IP rights powers in this specific situation.Or across the board, since they are absurdly powerful right now. Nintendo could not legally keep you from hacking a console before the DMCA.

It&#x27;s not like consumer electronics contain top secret tech like EUV machines. All supply chain for firmware &#x2F; software of 99.99% devices is very boring, contains absolutely nothing secret and the only reason why it&#x27;s &quot;difficult&quot; is because IP owners was not bothered.Once single EU &#x2F; US legislation introduced that force manufacturers into opening end-of-life products all IP right owners will either immediately make it possible or go out of business.Since everyone will be forced to do the same no one will gain any advantages.

If they know they have to do it up front the ip rights issue disappears.

I agree, but there can be IP rights involved that make this difficult.

I wish there was a law that forced them to do that

This should be added into write-to-repair laws.

Yup. All the &quot;bricked&quot; cars should have their service software opened. All the old iPads that have perfectly good hardware....Planet is burning and the zillionaires have enough zillions already so I vouch for the Mando too.

This is the way! (And should be the law, maybe enforced by mandalorians taking greedy CEOs!)

Exactly, I wish EU enforced this.Maybe the general rule should be like, if something isn’t in the users control and the user doesn’t want it anymore or can no longer function despite not being damaged, then the company should take back the hardware and refund the user.So the company still have two options, either refund or open-source the systems needed for the device so that the user or third-party can continue supporting it.

This comment strikes me as absurd. How exactly would you propose that something like that be done?

&gt; More companies should follow this approachNo, the law must mandate that. You either provide active support, or if you end it you must open-source all tools necessary to perform maintenance. It&#x27;s one of those things that has to be mandated by law to provide a uniform floor on all companies and manufacturers, like food safety laws, fire codes, or accessibility for the physically disabled.

I wish meta would do the same for its portal devices. The devices are solid hardware. They removed a ton of app support that needed cloud services.I loved their camera tracking and picture frame along with their speaker quality.

It would be an unwise business move. The moment that is done, Linux&#x2F;WINE will be able to run the bulk of the software that keeps a substantial number of people locked into Windows. Most people don&#x27;t need the newest version of their software to stay productive.

This this also good marketing, if other companies I currently buy speakers from follow their footsteps I&#x27;ll keep supporting them, but I might otherwise just move towards Bose in the future. I wish Apple would do this for their ultra legacy stuff, Microsoft does it for their legacy stuff. Not sure if we&#x27;ll ever get a fully open sourced legacy version of Windows (ignoring the source code leak) but it would be cool to one day see the Windows XP source code on GitHub.

Yes! This! If only my Sonos speakers were open-sourced....

I suspect it&#x27;s because the technical staff have already been let go or replaced with outsourced maintenance-only staffing firms, which means the non-technical leadership doesn&#x27;t know whether the source code would contain damaging information.

The reason I&#x27;ve heard for games which I assume is similar here, is that there&#x27;s licensed code used which the developer can not release because they don&#x27;t own it (someone else does)

++1I do not get why not more companies are doing this! Also it pays so much into your brand perception etc.; also you will always have all ecological folks on your side because of &quot;not producing new stuff&quot;.This is the cheapest and best way to get the most out of your investment after it entered end-of-life.

This should be in the law imho. No hardware or software should have its support abandonned unless the spec &#x2F; schematics &#x2F; parts list and&#x2F;or source code is released in a public repo.

i’d love for this to be required by law. i’m probably not thinking of some great reason why that might be a bad idea, but it seems like an effective way to reduce e-waste.

I believe that if someone (or some company) changes their ways we should accept that and not condemn them forever.

&gt; Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn&#x27;t some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.Compare Bose&#x27;s response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I&#x27;d read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.Afaik, it didn&#x27;t lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose&#x27;s case.

And?When presented with information that you&#x27;re acting in bad faith, if you choose to change: that is praiseworthy.It&#x27;s very brave to take that in, and not worry about &quot;brand damage&quot; or &quot;appearing weak&quot;. It&#x27;s brave to even challenge yourself when someone tells you you&#x27;re wrong. It&#x27;s entirely admirable.It&#x27;s the default human behaviour to double-down.

&gt; transformed the devices into dumb-speakers&#x2F;ampsIsn&#x27;t that still gonna happen now?From [1]:What will no longer work:• Presets (preset buttons on the product and in the app)Of course Bluetooth and AirPlay continues to work, but isn&#x27;t that what a &quot;dumb speaker&quot; is?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a>

&gt; Bose should not receive praise for this move.Remind me of any other vendor in recent history that end of lifed a hardware product and then open sourced it whether they got backlash or not. Because I can’t think of a single one.So yes, Bose absolutely deserves praise.

Don&#x27;t punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it&#x27;s arguably an even better signal to see that they&#x27;re willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.

Well they still did it, thus praise (though less effusive than if they had just done it initially).

Is the world a better place before or after Bose decided to change course?

I&#x27;ve got a simple formula in life for when people do things beneficial to me: I praise them for it and encourage them to keep it going. If someone does things antagonistic to my interests, and then corrects course in reaction to objection, they can be sure they&#x27;re going to be rewarded. This has worked for me.If your belief is that some other tactic works, then I can see why you&#x27;d do that. For my part, carrot + stick has always worked better than stick + more stick.

There is no winning or redemption after getting cancelled it so seems.

Why should Bose not get credit for this? If you are saying that people should treat them the same regardless of whether they listen to their consumers or not, then why would they ever bother listening to the consumers?Also remember that there is no believer like a convert. A community helping guide a company towards open source culture could make for a very strong ally.Then again I know nothing about Bose’s open source culture so take it with a grain of salt.

Ugh, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Bose: does something bad.
People: complain.
Bose: undoes what they did and does something slightly better.
You: complain.I&#x27;m not sure I get the logic here.Slowly but steadily I&#x27;m comprehending why companies are getting tired of some people. No matter what companies do, people will always complain. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there&#x27;s always room for more improvement, but a slight complement for their slight improvement won&#x27;t hurt anyone + a change in tone from complaining to suggesting improvements would be a nice bonus.

Well maybe they should receive praise for changing their mind.  I get your point but they could have doubled down.

I don&#x27;t understand this attitude. Bose listened to feedback, and responded in a positive way.That&#x27;s a good outcome for the community, and refusing to &quot;praise&quot; Bose&#x27;s actions just because they didn&#x27;t originally do what you wanted is petty and churlish.

Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash. In an older version of their end-of-life announcement, most functionality of the speaker systems would have removed and transformed the devices into dumb-speakers&#x2F;amps.Good that they changed their statement and took the right action. Even better for the community for stepping up and &#x27;forcing&#x27; Bose to do so.Sources:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20251201051242&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20251201051242&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose....</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;10&#x2F;bose-soundtouch-home-theater-systems-regress-into-dumb-speakers-feb-18&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;10&#x2F;bose-soundtouch-home...</a>

This could fail if too many players start to abandon&#x2F;open source their products at the same time. It could lead to an overload.Plus, I purchased my product thinking it will last forever. Sudden announcements for EOL is a terrible trend. Laws should regulate having proper disclosures that a product is promised to be serviced for x number of years at minimum, and&#x2F;or mandate manufacturers themselves provide updates to allow the product to work independently of them.

Or they could have offered local control from launch and not had this issue.

It actually was. Everyone in this thread has completely missed the fact that nothing has been opened at all. (see other threads for details)

It&#x27;s definitely laudable. But does raise the question... why was the API not open in the first place.

Yes, precisely.I am no fan of Bose for a lot of reasons, but this is seriously standup behavior for sure.

Ideally this would be a legal requirement

This is how &quot;end of support&quot; should be handled. Instead of turning devices into e-waste, open-source them and let the community extend their life. Kudos to Bose for setting a good example.More companies should follow this approach - especially as right-to-repair becomes a bigger issue.

Yeah, I couldn&#x27;t even get the damn thing to work reliably when it was new. Oh but you can rest assured that it had no problem exfiltrating all that precious data of mine about what I was doing, and any other things they could suck out of my Android phone. No way in hell will I EVER buy another Sonos product.

Backtracked or not I won&#x27;t ever buy Sonos because of that move.

Respect to Bose for taking a better stance on this. I still remember Sonos implementing &quot;Recycle Mode&quot; that they thankfully backtracked on.

I&#x27;m in the market for speakers and Bose definitely has rose higher on my list

The rest api was taken apart years ago for my old Sonos. They had originally promised to add AirPlay support later said, “Just kidding. Why don’t you brick it instead.” At that point I was finished with closed ecosystems for audio. At least someone made an AirPlay agent that lives on the home server. That speaker has survived many years too.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Fzrqe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Fzrqe</a>

Maybe Bose doesn’t have all the rights necessary to open source their code, eg because they rely on libraries.

what more do you actually need?Unless you want to actually develop ON the device (and build binaries etc...), this completely allows you to use the device and connect it to whatever, so I don&#x27;t know what more we should expect.No one else is doing this, so yeay applause

Don&#x27;t let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it&#x27;s a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.Evolution v. Revolution. I&#x27;d prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.

Yeah, it&#x27;s kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.

yes. especially when you consider that point 2 requires some amount of investment (writing the api docs, ensuring no ip leaks, etc.)

Yeah that&#x27;s quite fair, the article is not very accurate.It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:1. Removal of cloud dependency2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)With a minor 3rd piece:3. The official app will be updated to support the &quot;offline&quot; mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.All very laudable things IMHO. I&#x27;m actually going to buy one of these

The title of the article is misleading. The API documentation is indeed useful but I wouldn&#x27;t call publishing the API documentation open source.

There are several things they could open source: the firmware, the server, the app.I assumed they meant the firmware, and was quite surprised they would do that...

The soundtouch web api which is what was &quot;open sourced&quot; was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don&#x27;t think anything actually happened here. I&#x27;m so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.

Source code to what?This is making them controllable.The headline may be inaccurate, but I&#x27;m not clear on what source code you&#x27;d even want. To the firmware do you mean?A documented API seems like the most useful option here.

Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It&#x27;s highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty

Agree that the &#x27;Open Source&#x27; is misapplied in this instance. I do applaud Bose for providing a graceful EoL to their product and consumers.

I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn&#x27;t open source their app either.What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.In understand why they would do that, they don&#x27;t want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.

Providing API specs is not open-sourcing them. Where&#x27;s the source code?

Not crazy. I would be much more willing to buy a device, in general, if it was advertised as NOT cloud-dependent rather than cloud-dependent.

This might sound crazy to some people, but I think this is much better than ongoing support. Removal of reliance on cloud alone is a massive feature that gets me interested in buying one of these (I don&#x27;t currently own one). And the fact it has an API I can hit myself? Awesome!!!

This makes me more likely to buy Bose.Why would I buy something that a vendor intends to kill off in an attempt to make me buy again?

Happy to see this happening. You know what would make me even happier? Having open source alternatives available to use as soon as I buy the device, not only after it&#x27;s discontinued

Cool to see the Invoke getting mentioned!I was the engineering lead on that product, and built a SW platform from scratch for it (Microsoft provided an SDK to Cortana which they developed in parallel.)The internal build could actually run Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously and you could e.g. set an alarm with one of them and query it with another, and they could interrupt each other based on priority. Obviously nobody wanted that feature, but it was hella cool that it worked. Oh, and you could make Skype calls from across the room, and the microphone array lived up to Skype&#x27;s tough certification requirements which took weeks of testing in Microsoft&#x27;s anechoic chamber for the DSP&#x2F;algorithm team to fine tune.I tried to push for open-sourcing the platform but it was tricky because 1) the director of engineering in Harman didn&#x27;t know what open source meant and for a hardware focused business to understand the value was a hard sell, 2) it used a HW module that came with a SW stack I mostly got rid off but a few parts were remaining that would need to be replaced which would require additional resources, 3) I was burned out at that point and had limited energy left to fight the good fight. Really too bad, it could have been a cool voice agent development platform, and I honestly think it would have sold in large volumes as a developer-friendly device.Glad you like it, sorry about the remaining Bluetooth bugs nobody got around to fix, since it basically flopped instantly.

Very nice!One time I got a free Harman Kardon bluetooth speaker from Microsoft (the Invoke from 2017). They were $100* but went on sale for $50 and I snagged one.Then Microsoft discontinued Cortana for it, but they didn&#x27;t kill the speaker. They released firmware that turned it into a perfectly good bluetooth speaker (which I still use today.) And they sent me a $50 gift card* to buy something else from Microsoft. Good will! I was a big fan of Microsoft hardware. Shame about the software...* Apparently $200 initially but they had some steep sales because Cortana as a voice assistant wasn&#x27;t reviewing well. Reviews are a bit negative on the sound quality. Probably true enough at $200, but for $0-50, I think it&#x27;s actually really good sound quality.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harman.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;releases-20200730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harman.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;releases-20200730</a>

This should be standard practice. Some companies have terrible policies around bricking their products.When my kid was born, I bought a brand-new Snoo. After six months, I wanted to sell it since we no longer needed it. That&#x27;s when I discovered stories of people whose used Snoos had been bricked by the company. For such an expensive product, that is such a waste. If I&#x27;d known about this beforehand, I never would have made the purchase in the first place.

I mean, suppose a CD player only used proprietary CDs. If the company dropped support and opened it to every other CD brand, would you complain that you can&#x27;t load cassettes? Or burn ISOs with it?

The speakers have a telnet interface and DLNA support, but no documentation and I was not able to make it work with MiniDLNA in a couple of hours of trying.

The released documentation:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;...</a>From a quick glance it looks like you are just able to do high level playback controls, similar to what you&#x27;d do using their on-device UI. Perhaps that&#x27;s enough?

Great move Bose! I hope this trend continues - it&#x27;s really nice to see a vibrant market for used&#x2F;vintage electronic products in some categories (e.g. old iPods) rather than them just contributing to more e-waste.

I think it would be a good idea to tax companies significatnly when bricking their devices, it&#x27;s creating e-waste. Open sourcing them like this would be a way for them to avoid fines.

Meanwhile they &quot;bricked&quot; the login in their app for some countries arbitrarily: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bose&#x2F;s&#x2F;ijKcvl09FW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bose&#x2F;s&#x2F;ijKcvl09FW</a>Now users like me can&#x27;t configure their devices (because the login is mandatory for using anything in the app). Some users report they aren&#x27;t even able to use it with a VPN.The over-reliance on closed source apps with mandatory logins for configuring devices you own must come to an end.

I have 2012 Sonos hardware. You can still get the original Sonos S1 controller, which works with old stuff. It&#x27;s pretty annoying that all the new stuff is S2 (and that app is better supported), but it&#x27;s not as hard as you&#x27;re describing it. You can get it off Google Play and just use it.The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn&#x27;t really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.

I have my fathers Sonos soundbar and a pair of speakers at home that I bought for him as Christmas gifts years ago. I still can&#x27;t believe they knowingly released an app that bricked older devices.I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I&#x27;ve heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.Stay away from Sonos.

Hey Sonos, this is how you handle old products, and this is why most of us wont touch your hardware ever again.

Hopefully, someone from Bose sees these comments. There is a serious segment of the pro and prosumer audio market that values open-source, interoperability, long service life, and is willing to pay a bit more for it.I hope Bose continues to do this for future products and is rewarded financially for it.

Nice. This reminds me of Logitech who open sourced LMS (Logitech Media Server) when they discontinued their multiroom product (known as Squeezebox before they bought it).Still a fantastic multi-room setup to this day... I run a server as well as a client from a Raspberry Pi.

Except they didn&#x27;t open source anything.  They just published a simple API spec to allow play&#x2F;pause&#x2F;next button support over http.

They hardware always been and continues to be finessed. Worth the extra premium imho.

I have used a ST10 as my tv speaker for years and despite being mono it has such a clear and full sound. Spectacular little box.

The hardware on the soundtouch 10&#x2F;20&#x2F;30 series was always surprisingly over engineered with heavy magnets, decent power supplies, and good enclosures but let down by a sluggish app and flaky mDNS implementation.With this, they just became the best value proposition on the used market. Flashing these with a minimal distro running snapclient (for multiroom audio) and shairport-sync (AirPlay 2) makes them infinitely better than they were on stock firmware. eBay prices are probably going to double by tomorrow morning.

I&#x27;m glad this has happened, but I&#x27;m be gladder if this was a legal requirement.

Reword a public announcement [1], slap on a misleading title, put it behind a cookie banner and paywall and boom - Journalism! &quot;Bose is releasing documentation for EOL smart speaker HTTP API&quot; would be more apt. Not even Bose is claiming that anything has been open-sourced in their statement. Titling the section &quot;Open-source options for the community&quot; is as close as they come to that.Still, props to Bose for actively helping to keep their old devices usable.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a>

Considering that new speakers don&#x27;t use SoundTouch, I wonder too. I hope that they keep the app running for a while. This kit is expensive and it can&#x27;t have a short life time!

They&#x27;re discontinuing support for SoundTouch Speakers. The SoundTouch App controls SoundTouch Speakers. Put two and two together...From their announcement:<pre><code> What will no longer work:
 • Presets (preset buttons on the product and in the app)
 • Browsing or playing music services directly from the SoundTouch app
 
 Important note: Your system will no longer receive security and software updates.
 Please make sure to always use your system on a secure, private network.</code></pre>

The question on my mind is will the SoundTouch app continue to be supported on new mobile
OS versions ?Is it the same app that caters for other speakers too ? If it is, and Bose continue to include their old speakers on the functionality of the app, then I can hardly see how this is a true EoL. They’re really continuing to support the speakers in their app, at least.

It’s a very nice thing to do, but from what I have read it is very much not open sourcing anything.Maybe that distinction is too arcane for general technology audiences, but I don’t really think it is?

Yeah but writing that backend app will be much much easier now

Also, when the likes of Spotify change their APIs, the integration will likely stop working too.

One thing nobody is touching on: since it&#x27;s not actually open source, when this thing is found to have dozens of security holes (or any bugs), they are not going to be patched.( Their announcement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a> The API doc: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;...</a> )

It was reverse engineered, not opened by IBM

IBM&#x27;s opening of desktop PC standards also contributed a lot to computing.Sometimes, an open API is all you need.

They are claiming open source, without doing it.Reality: users are still getting a feature cut with an update.

A comment here also says this is the case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46544001">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46544001</a>Looking over the API docs seems to confirm what the comment you referenced and the poster I linked here is saying. I&#x27;m seeing calls to virtually press buttons on the speaker, set the input source, to query the presets, and some zone-relayed calls, but nothing about actually playing audio from network sources.For the call re: presets I see:&gt; Description: Presets are a core part of the SoundTouch ecosystem. A preset is used to set and recall a specific music stream supported by the SoundTouch speakerThere&#x27;s a GET method that returns information about presets. Presumably you&#x27;d use a POST or PUT method to manage the presents. To that end, under POST, it says:&gt; POST: N&#x2F;AIt looks like this API basically allows you to control it like an dumb speaker. That&#x27;s not nothing, but it&#x27;s not much either.There doesn&#x27;t seem to be anything in the API about controlling how the speak communicates with a back end service.Edit:Having some time to read over your [2] and the link to [0] it looks like getting root on the speaker w&#x2F; physical access is ridiculously easy. Booting the unit w&#x2F; a FAT32 USB drive attached with a file named &quot;remote_services&quot; in an otherwise empty root directory opens up an ssh server and the root user has no password.The comments on [0] have some interesting tidbits in them, too.These speakers look like they might be fun to play with and once Bose kills the back end people may unload them cheap.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flarn2006.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;hacking-bose-soundtouch-and-its-linux.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flarn2006.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;hacking-bose-soundtou...</a>

Ah, that makes sense as well. Not sure why I fixated on what the speaker might call out to, and didn&#x27;t think of what might want&#x2F;need to control the speaker.

According to this comment[1] by an OSS developer working on reverse engineering the device, the documentation released doesn&#x27;t allow them to implement an alternative backend. If I understand the purpose of the interfaces correctly from skimming the reverse engineering effort github[2], the API released documents the HTTP interface between the phone app and the speakers, which has been available for years, and covers functionality that isn&#x27;t going away. The interface between the speaker and the cloud services that are shutting down is still undocumented.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;bose-open-sources-its-soundtouch-home-theater-smart-speakers-ahead-of-eol&#x2F;?comments=1&amp;post=44173165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;bose-open-sources-it...</a>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;deborahgu&#x2F;soundcork" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;deborahgu&#x2F;soundcork</a>

This is not open sourcing any actual software or hardware it is “open-sourcing the API documentation for its SoundTouch smart speakers”. You might be able to point them at an alternative back-end¹ if you want the cloud features, but that will need to be written from scratch rather than being forked from code provided by Sonos.&gt; When cloud support ends, an update to the SoundTouch app will add local controls to retain as much functionality as possible without cloud servicesThis is a far bigger move than releasing API information, IMO bigger than if they had actually open sourced the software &amp; hardware, from the point of view of most end users - they can keep using the local features without needing anyone else to maintain a version.--------[1] TFA doesn&#x27;t state that this will be possible, but opening the API makes no sense if it isn&#x27;t.

You know, it&#x27;s human to err sometimes, and since corporations apparently are people too, so can they err, this was written.Sometimes companies fuck up, what&#x27;s really refreshing is to see a company backpedal on a shit choice, and decide to do better. Nicely done Bose!

The folks on &#x2F;r&#x2F;bose were complaining loudly about this. I&#x27;m glad that Bose heard them and is allowing SoundTouch app development to continue!

If more vendors follow the lead of Logitech and Bose, opencycling would be a subset of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Upcycling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Upcycling</a>

&gt; opencyclingIs that a word? Seems interesting but never read it before.

I&#x27;ve just created a TypeScript version of the same API as the Python interface. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cssinate&#x2F;bose-soundtouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cssinate&#x2F;bose-soundtouch</a>

Thanks Bose for opencycling Bose hardware into OSS audio ecosystems that could support multiple vendors.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;captivus&#x2F;bose-soundtouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;captivus&#x2F;bose-soundtouch</a><pre><code> This library provides a clean, Pythonic interface to control SoundTouch speakers over your local network, ensuring your speakers remain fully functional even after cloud services end.
</code></pre>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lyrion_Music_Server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lyrion_Music_Server</a><pre><code> Lyrion Music Server (LMS) is a streaming audio server supported by the LMS community and formerly supported by Logitech, developed in particular to support their Squeezebox [discontinued in 2012] range of digital audio receivers.. [LMS] also works with networked music players, such as the Roku SoundBridge M1001, Chumby, O2 Joggler, RPi and the SqueezeAMP open source hardware player.</code></pre>

The headline is somewhat questionable, but that&#x27;s not Bose&#x27;s fault.

&quot;Smart&quot; things get old quickly...I think I bought one of these ten years ago.My parents&#x27; sound system is from the mid 90s

Oh cool! I got a set of SoundTouch speakers years ago because they supported simultaneous Bluetooth playback as well as synced cloud service playback. This was in 2018 so options were more limited then. Since it became clear Bose was shutting them down I&#x27;ve moved over to Wiims[1] for managing playback (the SoundTouch app was always kind of odd and hard to manage) - but allowing local control is really nice. Currently you need to hit a button to enable playing from AUX on the soundtouches - they won&#x27;t stay on the &quot;dumb speaker&quot; mode unless music is playing. Hopefully after this I&#x27;ll be able to set them up as permanent speakers driven by the wiims.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wiimhome.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wiimhome.com&#x2F;</a>

I am not a big fan of Bose for personal reasons, but they get my respect for this action.

This is where EU needs to put its weight and at least in Europe - if you sell something but not willing to support - open source client, server and device all sorts of software.

I got my first Bose headphone in 2008 or so. It was a treat for myself as a poor university student after a paycheque. I loved the headphone and one day it broke down after several years of heavy abuse. I called their customer service for repairs and how much it would cost. Rather than recommending me to just buy a new one, the customer support agent asked questions about the model, what the issue was, and offered a replacement.I&#x27;ve loved their product and support ever since. Glad to see this happening as well. Kudos.

It&#x27;s sad how surprised the author and all of us are. Has it really become the norm to create crap that you pay for, that just stops working one day and becomes e-waste? If that ever happens to me, that&#x27;s a company I&#x27;m never giving money to again, ever.

I really hope Logitech is paying attention, because when Harmony finally dies, I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;m going to replace it.

Really glad to hear this, I&#x27;ve been so close to throwing out my SoundTouch 20, which makes me sad because it looks great and sounds better than my Google Nest speaker (placement issue? hard to say).Has anyone found or started related github repos?

On the one hand it’s great Bose is doing this — on the other it sucks that this is so remarkable. Having stuff you bought that does not actually need the cloud continue to work should be the default.

Something Sonos could learn from perhaps (sorry - I have an interest here).

They&#x27;re not really &quot;open-sourcing&quot; anything in the sense that I would think about it. As far as I can tell they&#x27;re doing two things:* Removing cloud-server dependency from the app.* Publishing API documentation for the speaker.I actually think this is worth noting not so much in a &quot;well aktshully it&#x27;s not open source!&quot; kind of way, but as a good lesson for other manufacturers - because this is meaningfully good without needing to do any of the things manufacturers hate:* They didn&#x27;t have to publish any Super Secret First or Third Party Proprietary IP.* They didn&#x27;t have to release any signing keys or firmware tools.* They get to remove essentially all maintenance costs and relegate everything to a &quot;community.&quot;But yet people are happy! Manufacturers should take note that they don&#x27;t have to do much to make customers much happier with their products at end of life.

It&#x27;s the speaker API, not the server API

As others have said already, they are just un-obscuring the server API and restoring local control to your speakers when they discontinue the service. There is nothing noble about this, it is almost least they could do. I walked away from a large investment in Sonos gear over forcing legacy equipment into the cloud, this sort of thing is why.

Fun fact: Bose is 51% owned by MIT (non voting shares) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2011&#x2F;bose-gift" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2011&#x2F;bose-gift</a>

I wish Apple did this with the older iPhone models that can&#x27;t even connect to cellular networks anymore.

Great move BoseShame on you, Google. You disabled my Nest thermostat and Nest Secure alarm — I will never buy your products again.

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a>:&gt; Open-source options for the community&gt; We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: SoundTouch API Documentation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;...</a>).AFAIK, the soundtouch web API was already accessible via some bose developer portal. It doesn&#x27;t seem like they are open sourcing anything. This API just allows you to make basic requests to do things like change volume on the speaker.To support the smart features of the SoundTouch speakers, we would the soundtouch user management service. Speakers connect to this very frequently and its where refresh tokens for music services and presets are stored. The speaker firmware itself has lots of source code, including the bit to handle music services and playback. There is an abstraction layer for music service APIs. There is a process on the speaker that reaches out to a music service registry, which is an index of bose music service adapters. Each of these adapters essentially proxies a music service like tunein, spotify, and even the &quot;stream a custom station&quot; feature.If bose open-sourced the speaker firmware, we could make a firmware build which talks to a 3rd party user management service, and reaches out to a 3rd party music service registry. Then we could add and maintain music service playback for the community. But there is no open sourcing of any actual code here and this soundtouch web api cannot change the URLs on the existing firmware of the user management service or the music service registry.So to my eye this story seems misleading and just some PR nonsense. It&#x27;s a little frustrating reading all of the &quot;great job, Bose!&quot; comments here like anything was actually done... Disclaimer: I used to work at Bose.

This is a great PR move for Bose in a market that doesn&#x27;t care about name brands like it used to. Maybe they can win some customers back and be considered cool again.

Hear hear. I&#x27;m also a daily LMS&#x2F;squeezebox user, across many years.In fact, given the full-throated open source nature of that platform (you can even build your own player with a raspberry pi[1]), I doubt I&#x27;ll ever need to use anything else for the rest of my life for playing music in my home, even as my devices die and need replacement over time.... which does make me wonder: that&#x27;s great for me, but I can definitely see it as a deterrent for companies to do similar. If they want to make a competing future product, they&#x27;ll be competing against an open-sourced version of their past selves, too.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.picoreplayer.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.picoreplayer.org&#x2F;</a>

On a related note, I&#x27;m eternally grateful for the conversion to open source of the Squeezebox platform (now known as Lyrion Music Server) and SageTV.  I use both of these every day.

Direct link to the announcement (from the article):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a>SoundTouch API Documentation (pdf) linked from the announcement:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.bosecreative.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;496577402d128874&#x2F;original&#x2F;...</a>

They can play Spotify and radio over the internet.

You used to be able to walk over to a speaker and with 1 button click play music from a preset on a music service like Tunein or spotify.Now will need to fiddle with your phone to connect with bluetooth or something.

Why are these devices connecting to the Internet at all? Aren&#x27;t they supposed to be connected to phones and TVs via cable or bluetooth? I would never allow any &quot;smart&quot; anything device to speak to the Internet in the first place.

ianal and kudos to Bose for their relatively graceful hardware depreciation approach and releasing their API documentation; the license for said documentation does not appear to be easily recognized as &quot;open source&quot; by using a standard GPL, MIT, Apache, etc license.Has anyone read the API documentation EULA and can comment on if it really meets some recognizable standard for &quot;open source?&quot;

It was already released under the Bose developer portal. I don&#x27;t see anything new here.

While laudable, the release of the documentation is completely useless. The protocol is rather simple and was completely reverse engineered already many years ago. In fact it’s already integrated into several open-source home management tools e.g. Home Assistant.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CharlesBlonde&#x2F;libsoundtouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CharlesBlonde&#x2F;libsoundtouch</a>

and suddenly Bose is on the list of consumer products I will consider for my home. Good job!

Unrelated to Bose&#x27;s open hardware:
The project Gadgetbridge has headsets and earplugs from various brands, but almost no Bose.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgetbridge.org&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;bose&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgetbridge.org&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;bose&#x2F;</a>
The community show interest, but still nothing.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;Freeyourgadget&#x2F;Gadgetbridge&#x2F;issues?state=open&amp;q=bose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;Freeyourgadget&#x2F;Gadgetbridge&#x2F;issues?stat...</a>

The arguments in this thread about sound quality crack me up. Reminds me of when a famous mix engineer was in a best buy and the guy said &#x27;These sound just like it did in the studio!&#x27; He said, no it doesn&#x27;t. We used NS10s.

Well done Bose! This puts you higher on the list for my next purchase.I don&#x27;t understand why so many comments here are negative. This is a nice move, and Bose should be thanked and encouraged to do similar moves again. It&#x27;s a step in the right direction!

This is an amazing idea - whoever came up with it, should get a promotion. I&#x27;d not be surprised that if this continues, Bose could be what e.g.: ThinkPad became and will have a steady customer and fan base

Sadly this is not the norm, but this is a great step in the right direction.

Legends. Open source, create a community of hackers around your products, everyone is happy.

Interesting article - most products are treated as “delivered” the moment they ship. A project manager hands over, success is declared, and the organisation moves on. But physical products with embedded software don’t stop being systems just because the project ends — they keep accumulating risk, cost, and user impact right through to end-of-life.What usually gets missed is that end-of-life is still part of the project, even if it sits years downstream. When software support is withdrawn without a transition path, the hardware doesn’t just lose features — it loses trust. That’s not a technical failure, it’s a lifecycle planning failure.Open-sourcing at sunset is interesting because it’s one of the few mechanisms that acknowledges this gap. It doesn’t help most users directly, but it at least hands control back instead of silently bricking capability.I’m curious whether we’ll start seeing project managers and product teams treat “exit conditions” as a first-class deliverable — with explicit decisions about data, firmware, APIs, and ownership once commercial support ends — rather than treating end-of-life as someone else’s problem.

Just a separate post in case people found this helpful. Here are some APIs available so you can build your own apps:- Python: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;captivus&#x2F;bose-soundtouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;captivus&#x2F;bose-soundtouch</a>
- TypeScript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cssinate&#x2F;bose-soundtouch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cssinate&#x2F;bose-soundtouch</a>

After my last Sonos, I gave up on smart speakers. Recently I discovered Squeezelite-ESP32 &#x2F; piCorePlayer and I&#x27;m not going back. I&#x27;m free to choose my own speakers (and people sell great 2nd hand dumb speakers for nothing!), I can stream, sync, etc - and they integrate great with Home Assistant. No more proprietary protocol for me, thank you...

Putting software in long lived components — screens, speakers, whatever — is shortsighted as the industrial short term and barely engineered mindset.Maybe in an era where software can be carefully engineered to a point of actual completion it will make sense, but for now it’s mostly stupid.Open sourcing potential ongoing support and tinkering is good, but it doesn’t get the core problem that it wad probably never the right thing to put the smarts in the speakers in the first place.

Ooh, I might consider actually buying Bose products now. Way to go!

API Documentation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;2025.12.18-SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;2025....</a>Bose official announcement <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bose.com&#x2F;soundtouch-end-of-life</a>

I have a speaker in the lounge and kitchen. Wr want to be able to listen to the same thing whichever room we’re in. Or perhaps we don’t.Being able to say “play this stream in room 1,3,6 and this in room 4 and nothing in room 2,5,7” is a valuable feature for people who don’t live alone in a studio flat.

Why would anyone want a smart speaker, when every speaker acts as one when hooked to the sound output of a phone, wirelessly or wired?I&#x27;ll admit, I don&#x27;t want or use &#x27;smart&#x27; anything, and am currently trying to disable smart devices that were already present in my home from the previous owner.

Devices want to be portable. the competition for weight and size is very high. It&#x27;s ironic how as usage of phones increased considerably with social apps, people seem to not have a problem with thicker iPhones for larger battery. The current iPhone 17 Pro is a chonk that would probably have been considered bulky and backwards 10 years ago.The trends decide the standard. Many EVs use 18650 but I can see that for competition and weight reduction they may switch to a more proprietary standard like blade batteries in BYD for competition. It all depends on where the competition is going with it.For earwear, I would say that portability and weight is a big area for competition.

I don&#x27;t understand why consumer goods can&#x27;t use 18650 cells to make devices long-term viable instead of soon-to-be e-waste. There are fewer and fewer devices I&#x27;m willing to buy because interchangeable batteries seem to be going away.

Repairing the QC 35 was not difficult. It’s just a shame it requires soldering on a new battery pack. Even the drivers are replaceable with that little tool. A few years ago I gave mine an affordable overhaul with a new battery and replaced the earmuffs. Right as rain now.

The one thing I’d love to have is repairable Bose headphones. I’ve used different ones but Bose with proper EQ settings are extremely good. The comfort levels on those is exceptional. In my entire life I’ve never seen headphones this comfortable. But once the battery wears out getting it repaired seems to include soldering. Should’ve been easily swappable. Also their Bluetooth can be finicky. One more area that needs improvement.

If the software gains traction in a public git repo this could be a good purchase for someone wanting a cost effective, great sounding, customisable, retro styled speaker.

I actually found a nice SoundTouch 20 discarded on the curb, a couple months ago.I assumed it was probably discarded due to the frequent situation here, of student who is moving away, and who doesn&#x27;t want the hassle or expense of moving things that don&#x27;t fit in their luggage.Now I wonder whether it was discarded because the owner heard it was being bricked, so not worth moving with them.(Don&#x27;t worry, I&#x27;m a curb Jawa master. I carried it home, realized it was IoT that required an icky closed app thing to use it, and so gave it to an MIT student. I just emailed them the URL of this good news. Possible bummer for the previous owner, though.)

love it, but I&#x27;m surprised after the experiences I had with Bose in the past

All they did was republish their old developer API, here you can find an old copy, version 1.1.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.power-home.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;smarty&#x2F;2017-02-13_123201_Part%201-SoundTouchAPI_WebServices_v1%201%200.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.power-home.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;smarty&#x2F;2017-02-13_123201_...</a>Now there used to be a way to play music (notifications, if I remember correctly) directly to the speaker, but that required an App_Key. Bose stopped handing out App_key&#x27;s quite a while ago when they shutdown down their developer forums, see also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bose&#x2F;comments&#x2F;102ptjg&#x2F;is_there_any_way_to_get_a_developer_api_key&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bose&#x2F;comments&#x2F;102ptjg&#x2F;is_there_any_...</a>

Great on bose for doing this, but this is some of the funniest documentation I have ever seen. PDF with structs cut in half on page breaks lol

I dont own any of these but this is a great example to lead by. More companies need to do this

i&#x27;m curious to see whether this creates a large secondary market for EoL&#x27;d devices!

An interesting point is, SoundTouch has always had a local API available (publicly documented) on a web server that runs on a speaker (at least for the last 10+ years).

I feel like I&#x27;m on borrowed time with my SoundLink Mini II. Once a year or so I need to use their website to open a diagnostics tool and clear the logs on the system to get it working.

I wish they had done the same with there Soundlink mini series. They are amazing little speakers, but have some weird bugs with the battery.API docs probably wouldn&#x27;t help here so much, as open sourcing it&#x27;s firmware. One can dream.

It should be law for software that if there is a server component which requires hosting, or any such limitation, the company must opensource the code and protocols such that somebody could host it themselves after support is stopped.Applies to games, hardware, whatever - if it isn’t economically viable to run, let the users.

Bose continues to be an extremely consumer-friendly company (especially by today&#x27;s standards). I remember back when the QC35s were THE noise cancelling headphones, the bridge* snapped on mine, I contacted Bose support asking if it could be fixed and they offered me a free replacement, no questions asked, a year after my warranty ended.* Is that what it&#x27;s called? The top part that goes over your head...

Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers