Android 6.0 Marshmallow, though a much wanted upgrade, is turning into a bit of a frustrating topic for Sony fans. That’s because quite a few features that the community used, like the ability to reboot your phone or Sony’s better STAMINA Mode, have been cut due to new policies informed by Google. Now SensMe is the latest victim though it looks like Sony should have killed off the feature long ago.

 For those wondering, SensMe is Sony’s proprietary music mood and tempo detection system that has appeared in various Sony products. 

The first nail in the coffin came from Google pulling old API’s, causing Sony to rewrite the app:

Due to technical reasons we had to remove the old “Edit Music Info”, since it wouldn’t work on Android M (as it used legacy API’s that no longer worked and had lost all support).

Since we are quite fond of SensMe, and it is – as some of you have pointed out – a “Sony uniqueness” we wanted to recreate a similar logic. The first (new) version was released in 9.1.5.A.1.0beta, but we quickly saw that the new version didn’t really work as well as we liked.

But despite the rewrite, it seems like Sony was never able to get the app to behave the way they wanted to. More after the jump.

Typically, this is when engineers decide to do the long grind on development to get the software just right but alas, it doesn’t seem like the work would have been a good use of their time.

 We could also see from our usage statistics that very few of you regularly use SensMe, actually less than three percentage. 

Yikes. Kudos to Sony for even trying to get the app rewritten in the first place if so few of its users used it. The big problem here is that the functionality was placed under the playlist part of the app and if you never clicked there, you’d never know the feature existed.

Despite us just having rewritten the feature and its underlying logic – we made the difficult decision to “kill our darling”. Instead, we are planning to implement a genre-selection (as requested by you in the community), which hopefully will, to some degree, fill the void left by SensMe. You in the beta community will of course be the first ones to try it out.

Ultimately, I think it’s wise for Sony to kill off little projects and apps like this and instead, focus on the core experience with their device. Once they can better nail down a tone and feel for their mobile division and begin to experience some meaningful growth, they can start to work on apps and services that aren’t critical for daily use.

Discuss:

Are you sad to see SensMe get killed off or did you never use the feature either?

[Via XperiaBlog]