The assumption in the VW/Porsche analogy is that Focal is somehow inferior to Naim. I really don’t think the bosses in Verdent see it that way. I suspect they see both brands as high end in their market.
Added to that, a VW Touareg R Line with reasonable spec costs more than £10k more than a Porsche Macan. I don’t think the Touareg driver will see their car as inferior. It’s just hranding on an app.
That’s why I picked this example: the subordinated brand (VAG in this case) dominating the premium brand (Porsche) - just on the analagogy of FOCAL & naim … causing in most cases a dangerous brand spillover and dilution of (premium) brand values. A brand is the holy grail in modern marketing and customer approach - not sure if the responsible people at naim are aware of this - otherwise they would have never risked such a naive rollout …
Please could we keep the thread to app install and functionality, otherwise important feedback gets lost within the noise. Thanks.
You are going very far, for just a name of an app. When you use the app you don’t see Focal anymore. For me nothing changed, it’s the Naim app still, the same as before. Perhaps am I not enough Naim centric?
I must admit, coming to Naim via the Atom HE after buying a Focal Utopia OG (which is an extremely synergistic pairing by the way), I’m surprised by all these sensitivities that the Focal brand seems to trigger with some users here.
I totally get the Naim legacy, I owned and own a lot of excellent British Hifi from Mission, Musical Fidelity, B&W and Exposure, and have a good friend who was a Naim aficionado since the Nait days.
But I’m really just puzzled why people are bothered by what I think being a really good speaker brand and an outstanding headphone company.
I’ve recently had the pleasure (at a shop called Focal powered by Naim…) the 200K+ Focal Grande Utopia driven by an end-game Naim chain. Wasn’t half bad, you know.
That people are annoyed that an app has bugs, totally get it (mine works fine by the way).
But why these tantrums over a logo change? Is this ye olde Albion vs. Frogs fight? It feels a bit like Agincourt or Waterloo here.
What does OG stand for?
Stoooop…with that stupid conservatism bullshit! the question is not to know if the name of the new application pleases you but if there are problems of functionality, the real life is that, everything evolves whether you like it or not.
For my part, I ask Naim to have an app that works, and it does for me.
If this is not the case for you, let us know, thank you.
Right. I have 2 Naim streamer based systems. An ND5 SX2 and a Nova. On both my iPhone (13) and newer iPad the Home Screen listings will disappear leaving only access to the volume control and the selected room name (top and bottom only) with the selected graphic background showing. Bit of a PITA as the app needs to be shutdown and restarted to restore functionality.
Tried deleting reinstalling to no improvement.
Would love to roll back to last version.
“But why these tantrums over a logo change? Is this ye olde Albion vs. Frogs fight? It feels a bit like Agincourt or Waterloo here.”
That’s precisely what it is. I suspect there would be a lot less whining about the marriage of Focal and Naim if Focal were an English company.
My god it’s an app that gives you access to your music it’s really a first world problem blown way out of proportion.
Maybe you should consider trading your stuff in and move to another manufacturer.
They could have called it “Naim & Focal” 
Naim/Focal might offend Focal supporters so where does it stop. It’s alphabetical and probably how most companies would work.
They could have called it apple sauce, it’s just a name (pardon the pun) for an app to operate your music. Don’t get me wrong I can understand someone jumping up and down if they’re have problems with the app itself.
Think some just take it a tad too seriously.
That was basically my point.
But so far the only Focal device serviced by the app is a set of headphones.
They could easily have released a separate app for Focal (Same code - different wrapper)
Im interested to see what they will release that requires platform integration of both brands.
Yet they’ve chosen to do the opposite. Different code, same wrapper.
Similar thing as the Focal/Naim brand boutiques. They will have their reasons for the co-branding. Looking at this forum it’s working, quite a few mentions of people buying or considering Bathy’s.
The reverse is probably also true, Focal owners thinking of Naim first. For everyone not interested in the other brand it’s just a name, whether they be Focal or Naim users. Should be something not too upsetting you’d think.
Anyway for a year or so before Verdent came along, Focal owned Naim. So no doubt the Focal guys regard Naim as the junior partner. Focal and Naim will seem obviously the right way round to them.
I think it’s lovely that they put the names in alphabetical order to avoid offending anyone while also using a lower case n in homage (not hommage) to the classic naim logo
I wonder if there’s a Focal users forum whether they complain about going to the store branded “Focal powered by NAIM” when they’re going to upgrade their speaker 
BTW, just like to introduce myself as a newbie here. 'Been lurking in this forum for a while and decided to make my first comment here. Cheers to all 
So, interesting discussion aside, there are no further issues?
The issue I raised about the accessibility fail of the app logo itself is unlikely to progress as accessibility is never top of any developers list but it’s interesting now I’ve had the app for a while to come back to that folder and see how I feel about it.
Without scrolling back I think I predicted that it was an app I’d be able to locate in the end because of its location in a specific folder rather than the logo as I do with other apps. That is indeed the case. The app logo is not an aid to identification at all. Given that the demographic for such products is the older male, who once over 40 will likely sees gentle deterioration in their vision, that’s not especially great.
What’s interesting to me is that this past weekend I was working at the Albinism UK residential conference and met some people involved in product design and was also introduced to a thing called bionic reading. The product designers considered the logo a fail because you don’t traditionally put a bold font before a standard font else you lose the second part because of the way most people read. Consciously or not then people are reading the app as a Focal app and not really seeing the word “naim”. Amusingly there was also a student at Strathclyde studying product design who was going to go away and use the new logo as an example of poor modern design as part of his next tutorial.
That was then reinforced by the bionic reading, which is based on the idea that by bolding certain parts of words we can read more efficiently by taking advantage of the way our eyes skim most words and sentences to divine meaning. The logo design accidentally uses this principle and effectively disappears the word “naim”.
Original. The reason I added this is that Focal just released a new version of the Utopia that has the same name but slightly different tuning.
Thanks! Yes, it’s actually the third version. I have the second and agree it’s a good match with the atom HE.