Rethinking Sonos, Again ⭐

Two years ago, Sonos committed the ultimate consumer service sin when it rearchitected its app, breaking just about everything. I coined the resulting debacle Sonosgate, but this wasn't the first time Sonos had coughed up a hairball.

How quickly we forget.
Lest we forget
First and mostly obvious, the previous version of the app was freaking horrible to begin with, and it says a lot about the quality of the newer app that customers were suddenly nostalgic for the old one.

Sonos and IKEA broke up in 2025, ending a wonderful era of cheaper Sonos smart speakers, relegating the brand back to a premium segment of the home/business audio market that's dominated by what I think of as the "CEDIA crowd," bespoke home theater installers for the rich.

2020 was a particularly tough year for Sonos fans. First, Sonos killed support for its older speakers and devices, some of which were 15 years old. But the backlash from the company's coddled customers was so severe that Sonos apologized and announced a way forward for legacy devices. (The better outcome here was that Sonos at least learned a lesson, and subsequent hardware had Bluetooth and USB-C connections for continuity and its latest devices are nicely user-serviceable.)

That same month, Sonos sued Google for stealing its smart speaker technology when the latter used the Big Tech playbook to pretend it wanted a closer partnership so it could get a closer look at what made it all work and then copied it for what's now called Google Cast. The resulting legal battles ensured that YouTube Music would never get the direct Sonos speaker management and control that Spotify and Apple (through AirPlay) users enjoy, alienating half the user base. Also, the legal battles are still ongoing. Though Sonos is correct here to push back against a thief with bottomless pockets, it's long past time for this silliness to end.

But its worst offense, of course, was Sonos putting disgraced ex-keyboard designer Panos Panay on its board of directors in August 2020 . But I kid. This is only the company's second worst offense.
Evaluating the past
When you think about this list of offenses, you might view Sonosgate as a sort of Flock camera moment for Sonos. Meaning, things were already imperfect before this latest offense, but there was something especially visceral about Sonosgate that just woke up the customer base. This issue was no more tone-deaf than its attempt at killing off legacy hardware four years earlier, though I feel like that effort was justified. What it betrayed was a complete disconnect between the company and its customers and what they treasured about the Sonos ecosystem. It showed that Sonos was far more interested in pursuing future growth in the form of new and potentially lucrative hardware form factors--its first headphones, in this case--than it was in maintaining the high quality ecosystem that its customers had bought into at great cost.

Trust comes up a lot in these here parts...