Sonos CEO Apologies for New App, Promises Biweekly Updates

Months after his company dropped a dumpster fire of a new app on its customers, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has finally apologized for the fiasco. And he’s promising a regular series of app updates to correct its many problems.

Which, when you think about it, is what Sonos did back in May, too.

“We know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app which rolled out on May 7, and I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Mr. Spence writes in a new post on the Sonos Blog. “There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.”

For those unfamiliar with this class action lawsuit in the making, in April Sonos announced it would release a new version of its smart speaker controller app in May, and then it followed through on that threat by releasing a completely rewritten mobile and web app that broke functionality for millions of customers and silently dropped features that many rely on every day. To put it mildly, this app is a complete clusterf#$k, and the Sonos customer base correctly reacted with outrage.

Sonos rushed the new app to market because of its new strategy to dramatically expand its product offerings this year, starting with an expensive pair of headphones that would need to work outside of the Sonos environments in customers’ homes. But its response to customers was incredibly off base, especially when you consider its previous controversies. The firm basically promised that it would add back missing functionality and fix all the bugs. And then it delivered the first update in late May.

The problem, for those not using Sonos equipment, is that the new app is still as terrible as it ever was. I only very recently figured out the bizarre new series of swipes I have to perform to switch between speaker inputs, something that was simple with the previous app. And a friend of mine with even more Sonos equipment than I have has never stopped complaining about this app over the previous two months. Literally today, he texted to explain that the new app plays a different podcast episode every time he tries to listen to one. And that when an episode completes, it moves on to a random new episode instead of playing the next one.

I had given up on the new app and am simply using AirPlay on my iPhone and iPad to handle content playback. But my friend is an Android user, and he doesn’t have that capability thanks to the long-running feud between Sonos and Google. So I looked up the app update history to see what Sonos had done since that late May update. And yikes. Not a freaking thing: Sonos released three updates to the app in both June and July, but many are platform-specific repeats, and none address the many problems its customers still complain about.

Spence admits to this, in a way, noting that the company has uncovered more bugs in the new app than expected, and fixing these bugs has delayed its previous plan to “quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.” But he also claims that those June and July updates each made “significant and meaningful improvements, adding features and fixing bugs.” I will simply point out that the missing features and bugs were all introduced by the release of the new app in the first place. And that no matter how many of those issues it fixes, the fact remains that Sonos should never have forced this app on its customers. Surely, it could have maintained two apps side-by-side for a while, as it did during a previous transition.

In any event, the new plan, which is the same as the old plan, is for Sonos to release software updates for this new app roughly every two weeks. And Mr. Spence has published a new schedule by which those updates will improve the app. Allegedly.

July and August: Sonos will improve the stability of the app when adding new products and will implement Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play features.

August and September: Sonos will improve the responsiveness of the volume interface (which currently lags behind the real volume), make unstated user interface improvements based on customer feedback, and improve overall system stability and error handling.

September: Sonos will improve alarm consistency and reliability.

September and October: Sonos will restore the ability to edit playlists and the Now Playing queue. And it will improve the functionality of the settings interface, whatever that means.

To me, this reads like a list of the things that should have been working before this app shipped: My initial complaint, literally, was that you can’t edit the Now Playing queue, a basic and obvious feature of any music playback app. But this also reads like the list of things Sonos said it would fix back in May. Or, as my friend noted when I forwarded him the Sonos blog post, “I’m hearing, ‘It will be fixed in six months … maybe’.” We’re both looking forward to participating in the class action lawsuit that is no doubt right now working its way through the courts.

“We plan to continue releasing new software updates on a bi-weekly cadence,” Spence concludes. “With each release, we will share detailed notes on what we’ve addressed and what we’re working on next in our Community [support forums]. We deeply appreciate your patience as we address these issues. We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and are working hard to do just that.”

It’s too late for that, unfortunately. As my friend just now texted me, “I can’t believe the [Sonos] board hasn’t fired Patrick.” It’s a fair point.

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A final update. After posting “Publish,” I opened the Sonos web app, chose a speaker, and selected an album to play so I could see whether I had missed something in all the improvements that Sonos supposedly made in June and July. I pressed Play; nothing happened. I pressed Play again, it started playing the album … shuffled. I selected the first song; it played a different song. I selected the first song again; it played yet another different song. This, folks, is the Sonos experience in mid-2024. And Patrick Spence cannot be fired quickly enough. Sign me up for that class action lawsuit. I’m ready.