Assuming you're referring to Sonos -- while they were once the best, they seem to just not work well anymore. I'm lucky if I can get it to function correctly. I've observed my brother's Chromecast whole-home audio which cost him a fraction of the price and has a ton more variety - and I'm thinking I may ditch my Sonos setup.

Strange. I recently purchased some Sonos products and haven’t had any issues whatsoever. They’ve been absolutely fantastic for me.

What issues are you experiencing? Wonder if it’s something I can keep a look out for.

My setup is from Audio Pro, a Swedish brand. Never really thought Sonos were good value for the price and sound quality to be honest... Not an audiophile but I always look for the best bang for the buck I'm spending on audio.

My Sonos speakers has been kind of buggy but I also have a brand new google home and it is not any better. I am thinking the blame is on google assistant. Google assistant seems to do a much better job understanding me but is inconsistent with nearly identical input. Alexa seems to be worse but is at least consistent.

Building your own is also ridiculously simple and as cheap or expensive as you’re willing to spend on speakers and/or drivers.

I switched my Sonos speaker over from Alexa to Google and it’s working well enough now.

Good point.

However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).

It surely does, I work at a place where we also have to deal with multiple partner integrations across multiple vendors and types of devices for our products, there's some overhead for it but not nearly as much as one would expect.

One would not be able to imagine when things operate at mega scale (FAANG level), with world conquering ambitions at Exec level, and particularly in consumer domain.

I was at MS when Windows was a 'thing'. Windows was purely about software, the complexity and support requirements scales in logarithmic scale as more and more OEMs gets involved with their unique hardware, business constraints and cultures.

I work for a pretty sizeable corporation, a household name you have heard of or use products from. I don't want to dox myself too much but I can say we are not MS level of support of OEMs (because that's a quite ridiculous bar to cross, haha) but still we do have quite a few integrations across multiple consumer device types.