Sonos is Still Trying to Fix its App

In the wake of firing its CEO and laying off 200 employees, Sonos is still trying to fix the broken app it shipped last May.

“The team and I remain 100 percent focused on two important priorities,” Sonos chief innovation officer Nick Millington writes in his first update since late 2024. “Understanding the root cause of every single customer issue, whether big or small, whether common or rare, and making sure the technical performance of the app meets or exceeds what you have come to expect from Sonos, [and] closing gaps in the functionality and usability of the new app relative to what you enjoyed before, in a priority order that is as responsive as possible to the feedback we receive from you.”

Most Sonos customers are probably confused why this is taking so long–how are we still talking about functional regressions and performance issues in this app 10 months after it was first launched?–while those on the outside are likely just confused, period. But on and on it goes. Sonos had an app that barely worked–this was always the Achilles Heel of this ecosystem and the legal battle with Google made it worse for many users–and then they replaced it with an app that, inexplicably, was even worse. Much worse.

Sonos has been trying to fix this app since it first pushed it to its customers. It added a few features back later that month. It started adding back features on a biweekly basis. It delayed new products to focus on the app and then, quite recently, killed what would have been its biggest product launch of 2025. It tried to bring back its old app, but couldn’t. It made its app bug tracker public. Started making meaningful inroads on feature regressions. Reformed its development process to ensure this never happens again. And the finally and belatedly fired the CEO responsible for this mess.

And yet here we are. Still.

Millington cites the latest updates to the app, which added a variety of improvements tied to waking up portable speakers, the ability to snooze an alarm, the layout of the app settings, search and volume slider performance, and so on, all of which feel pretty basic. And he says that upcoming app updates are focused on creating and editing Sonos playlists, improving app startup performance, local music library functionality and performance, and more improvements to volume and overall system performance. Again, all of which feels pretty basic.

“As Interim CEO Tom Conrad and I have promised, we will continue work on the app, both technical performance and functionality,” he concludes.

How are we still having this conversation? On the one hand, it’s just an app, for cripe’s sake. But it’s also the center of the Sonos experience for many of this company’s customers, and it’s unclear how you screw something like this up so badly. Further unclear is why it’s taking so long to get it right.

I cannot believe we’re still discussing this topic. The Now Playing queue issues I identified immediately last May, for example, still are not fixed in this app. That’s music app 101, Sonos.

Shame on you.