Bose SoundTouch after the cloud shutdown: what stopped working, and what you can do about it
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On 6 May 2026, Bose switched off the cloud service behind its SoundTouch speakers. If you own one, you already know what that felt like: the speaker still powers on, still sounds exactly the same, and yet half of what you used it for is gone.
This page is the plain version of what happened, what you lost, what you did not lose, and what can be done about it. It covers every free project I know of, including the one I build myself.
What actually stopped working
Everything that ran through Bose servers:
- Internet radio, and anything else you used to browse inside the SoundTouch app. Every station you had set up stopped playing.
- The six preset buttons on top of the speaker. They still click. Nothing happens.
- Alexa voice control, on the models that had it.
- Stereo pairing on the SoundTouch 10.
- Security and software updates. Firmware 27.0.6 is the last version there will ever be.
Spotify Connect is the confusing one. Bose kept it in the list of things that still work, and on a speaker that was already set up it does. Pairing a new speaker with Spotify, though, ran through the Bose cloud, so that part went with it.
What still works
More than most people expect, because it never went through the cloud in the first place:
- AirPlay
- Bluetooth
- The analogue aux input, and HDMI or optical on the soundbars and theatre systems
- Spotify Connect on a speaker that was already paired
- Playback from a NAS or a computer over the local network
- Setting up a speaker, grouping speakers, and the basic play, pause, skip and volume controls
- The speaker itself, the amplifier, the drivers, the buttons as hardware
That is the part worth saying out loud. Nothing on your speaker broke. A server was switched off, and a device that still works perfectly lost its most used function.
How this happened
Bose announced the end of SoundTouch cloud service in October 2025, originally for 18 February 2026. After a public backlash the date moved to 6 May 2026, a final app update was promised for the functions that did not depend on the cloud, and the SoundTouch Web API documentation was published.
The published API is the part that matters here. Bose pointed owners toward independent developers rather than leaving the platform closed. It did not build a replacement itself, but it did leave the door open, and several people walked through it.
Which speakers are affected
The SoundTouch line ran from 2013 to 2020 and covered rather more than most people remember:
| Model | Type |
|---|---|
| SoundTouch 10 | compact speaker |
| SoundTouch 20 | mid size speaker |
| SoundTouch 30 | large speaker |
| SoundTouch 300 | soundbar |
| SoundTouch Portable | battery speaker |
| Wave SoundTouch, series III and IV | radio and CD system |
| SoundTouch SA-4 | amplifier |
| SoundTouch SA-5 | amplifier, often used for whole home audio |
| CineMate with SoundTouch | home cinema system |
| SoundTouch Wireless Link | streaming adapter for existing hi-fi systems |
| Lifestyle with SoundTouch | home cinema system with SoundTouch adapter |
Bose has never published unit numbers, so anyone quoting one is guessing. What can be said is that the line ran for seven years across nine model families and sold at prices between roughly 200 and 1,000 US dollars.
What you can do about it
Several independent projects now restore the missing functions. None of them is made by Bose, all of them can be used without paying, and they take different approaches. The important difference is not the feature list, it is where the software runs.
Some of these projects replace the Bose cloud with a small server of your own. That works, and some of them are excellent, but it means the speaker only plays while that second device stays switched on. If you already run a Raspberry Pi or a NAS around the clock, this costs you nothing extra. If you do not, you have traded a dependency on Bose for a dependency on a box in your cupboard. Others are a phone app, which is fine for browsing and pressing play, and less fine if what you want back is a button on the speaker working while your phone is in another room.
| Project | Where the software runs | Preset buttons |
|---|---|---|
| AfterTouch | Raspberry Pi, a virtual server, or the speaker itself | Yes |
| Better ST | an iPhone and iPad app, plus its own server on your network for the buttons | Yes, since version 2.0 through the bundled server |
| BoSonar | an Android app on your phone | Yes, plus six more inside the app |
| Bosman | an app on your phone, iOS and Android | Yes, managed from the app |
| SixBack | a small ESP32 stick you flash yourself, roughly five euro of hardware | Yes |
| SoundCork | a server on your network | Not documented |
| SoundTouch Hybrid 2026 | Docker on a NAS or PC, or as a Home Assistant add on | Yes, twelve of them by double tapping |
| SoundTouchPlus | inside your Home Assistant instance | Not documented |
| STR (SoundTouch Reborn) | on the speaker itself | Yes |
Checked against the documentation of each project in August 2026. These projects move quickly, so follow the links for the current state. If something here is wrong about your project, tell me and I will fix it.
About STR, since I built it
I should be upfront: this site belongs to STR, so treat this section as what it is.
STR installs a small program into the internal storage of the speaker, on top of the last official Bose firmware. After that, nothing else has to run in your house. No Raspberry Pi, no NAS, no hub, no phone kept open, no account, no subscription. The speaker boots on its own and works on its own, the way it did before 2026.
STR is not the only project that can end up on the speaker itself. AfterTouch offers that as one of its three deployment options, and it is a good piece of work. The difference is that with STR it is the only mode and the whole thing is a desktop app: there is no server to choose, host or maintain, because there is no server.
How it works, briefly, for anyone who cares about the details:
- A desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux finds the speaker on your home network and pushes the software across. It used to require a USB stick. It does not anymore, the stick is only a fallback for a speaker that cannot be reached over the network.
- Playback goes through the UPnP interface the original firmware already exposes, so no custom audio path was needed.
- The preset buttons were the hard part. The firmware publishes button presses on a local message bus, and the STR agent listens to that bus, so pressing button 3 is handled entirely on the device with nothing else involved.
- Station data comes from the radio browser project.
- A button press can additionally trigger a configurable webhook, which is how people wire a speaker button into Home Assistant or Node RED.
It is free, MIT licensed, and written by one person in Cologne, Germany, as interoperability work on hardware I own, which Article 6 of EU Directive 2009/24/EC permits. It has been downloaded 65,828 times so far. Nothing is for sale and there is no paid tier.
If you want to try it, everything lives on the start page.
STR is not affiliated with Bose. Bose and SoundTouch are trademarks of Bose Corporation.