Devialet Predictions for 2020

[Confused]

Back before I retired, the office I worked in supplied a desk calendar refill each year to staff. Each day had its own quotation and some were attributed to "WGP". I once asked someone who WGP was and was told that it was an acronym for "World's Greatest Proverbs". What has this to do with a thread about predictions for Devialet?

One year, the quotation on that calendar for January 1 said "There will be no change in men's pockets this year" and it was attributed to WGP. Did it mean that men would be no better off and have no more money in their pockets that year or did it mean that men's clothing would have exactly the same pockets as in previous years? It was a pretty safe prediction either way because it would  have been equally valid for every previous year for a long time.

I predict the more things change, the more they'll stay the same. In other words, some Devialet owners will get things they want and some won't. At present Devialet seem focussed on the Phantom/Reactor range so we'll see some software movement there and Expert Pro owners will feel neglected but at some stage, maybe not this year, the focus will shift back to the Expert Pro range and the Phantom/Reactor owners will start to feel neglected. That switch in focus back to the Expert Pro range will occur before Phantom/Reactor owners are completely satisfied. New software for both ranges will have bugs and won't work as well as it should. Bug fixes will be slow for bugs that don't affect everyone, becoming an ongoing source of frustration for those afflicted by them.

There will be one or more new spinoff products, collaborations with other firms, and we'll all ask why Devialet is fiddling around with that sort of thing when they could be delivering on what's promised for their own product lines and fixing their software bugs.

There will be promises of better communication but there will be little or no change in their communication with owners.

In other words Devialet will continue on in its own idiosyncratic way this year as it has done in previous years.

The above predictions are a fair description of 2019, and 2018, and 2017 when I became a Devialet owner. My experience doesn't go back any further than that but I expect the above predictions would have worked for earlier years as well.. Devialet doesn't learnt from the past, it repeats it If anyone wants to know how 2020 will go for Devialet owners, they just have to look at how 2019 and earlier years went for Devialet owners.

There will be no change in our overall experience this year. Some details will change but the big picture won't. Describe the previous year in general terms and you've got a good prediction for the coming year when it comes to Devialet.

In general, I have to agree this is a fair summary of where we are now.  However, the above predictions would not have worked for earlier years as well, consider that for most of 2015 there was no Devialet Phantom, there was just the Expert range, nothing else.  During this period we had regular firmware updates for the Expert, typically two major updates per year, with the odd interim firmware update appearing quite regularly.  In a way, this time was as you describe, so in 2014/15 we had the Expert owners getting update goodies and some D-Premier owners feeling left out.  From late 2015, we have the Phantom, the Reactor, Sky box and other such stuff, and find ourselves in the position you describe now, except for 2016 when the Expert Pro upgrade scheme was in full flow, together with the O'dA debacle.

Looking forward, personally, I think there will be some big surprises over the coming years, I predict that ultimately Devialet will remain very unpredictable.

Going back to @struts original post, Devialet were quite clear regarding their plans during the Q&A session at Oxford Audio last summer, there would be a "unified remote control" app, first for the Phantoms, then rolled out for the Expert range.  I guess we have seen the start of this with DOS2, but the question remains of when (or maybe if) they will ever complete this initiative.