Sonos
Sonos issued a redesigned app in May, and what lots of customers noticed about it wasn’t the refreshed look, but the things from the previous design entirely missing. Not small things, but things that Sonos enthusiasts would really notice: sleep timers, local music library access and management, playlist and song queue editing, plus accessibility downgrades.
In May, a Sonos executive told The Verge that it “takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.” You might ask if bravery could have been mustered to not release an app before it was feature-complete.
Now, nearly three months after shipping, Sonos leadership has pivoted from excitement about future innovations to humility, apology, and a detailed roadmap of fixes. CEO Patrick Spence starts his “Update on the Sonos app from Patrick” with a personal apology, a note that “there isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down,” and a pledge that fixing the app is the No. 1 priority.
New update have arrived every two weeks since the big change, Spence writes, and there are more to come. A better device-adding experience and, finally, a local music library interface should arrive in July or August. August and/or September bring volume responsiveness, UI upgrades, and general stability, plus Alarm reliability. Editing your playlists and queue could arrive in September or October, according to Sonos’ post.
This is not the first time Sonos has acknowledged missteps in its aims to refresh its mobile apps, but it is the most public and contrite, and perhaps realistic in timing. In mid-May, Sonos emailed its software and API partners about “valuable feedback” on “the areas where we fell short,” according to an email obtained by Ars Technica. Back then, Sonos told partners it intended to have alarms, queue editing, sleep timers, local music libraries, and Wi-Fi update settings sorted by the end of June.
While different resources can be deployed on different projects, it didn’t help existing customers’ perceptions that, two weeks after shipping its rather incomplete mobile app updates, Sonos announced the Ace, new $450 headphones. As we wrote then, the update did make doing basic tasks like adjusting volumes faster, but its lack of existing features left Sonos “playing damage control with an angry subset of its normally loyal user base.”
It’s also notable timing that Sonos’ public-facing apology and roadmap arrives a few days after the consumer guide Wirecutter updated its guide to multiroom wireless speakers, noting it could no longer recommend Sonos products “as the best overall choice.” The guide cited the app update leaving customers “with a much less intuitive experience than they had before,” along with it being “not the first time Sonos has hurt customer trust through poorly executed changes.”
That user base, which has been asking the company what happened ever since early May, now has some sense that they’re not posting into the void.
This post was updated to note the Wirecutter’s recently revised recommendations for multiroom wireless audio, per comment.