Sonos Admits Its Recent App Update Was a Colossal Mistake

July 26, 2024:

When setting up my Sonos home theater system, I had a persistent problem. I was trying to add a Sonos wireless subwoofer to my network, but according to Sonos’ mobile app, the Sub was nowhere to be found. The app would throw a “Could not connect” message, or—even weirder—show me that I was trying to connect a gray box labeled “product” with a serial number that had nothing to do with anything.

“I thought the smart home was supposed to make your life easier,” my husband commented mildly, as he watched me factory reset the Sub a few times, turn my phone on and off again, toggle Bluetooth, switch phones, and finally bang my head against a wall and cry before calling Sonos tech support.

As we all know, I am far from the only one who has problems with Sonos’s new app; the company pushed out a radical redesign in May that broke a number of key features—such as the ability to change the volume on some of its speaker systems—and angered countless longtime Sonos fans.

Today, more than two months after the contentious redesign, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence finally acknowledged the general customer disappointment in a long note posted to the company’s Instagram account. “Since launch we have had a number of issues,” he wrote in a hilarious tone of wry British understatement. Spence apologized for the frustration the update caused, and noted that fixing the broken app continues to be Sonos’ “number one priority.”

The post refers customers to the detailed list of Sonos software updates that have already been released, and lays out a roadmap for further improvements to the hobbled app. Here are some of the problems that Sonos promises to fix in the upcoming months:

Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play (in July and August)
Improving volume responsiveness (in August)
Improving alarm consistency and reliability (in September)
Restoring edit mode for playlists (in September and October)

That’s a short list, and maybe it’s too short. The number of improvements the company needs to make is—no point in beating around the bush here—preposterous. I am having trouble thinking of an app update fiasco large enough to compare it to this one, because in my time as a consumer tech reporter and editor, I cannot think of another software update that took away users’ ability to control the volume.

More than that, I can’t think of another update that took away users’ ability to control the volume and then did not immediately fix that. For months! I reached out to Sonos asking why Spence’s timeline for fixes is so prolonged. The company has not yet responded.

It’s worth nothing here that Sonos’s hardware remains the gold standard in the premium consumer audio world. My colleague Parker Hall refers to the Era 100 as the new smart speaker standard; the Ace wireless headphones earned an 8/10 and a WIRED Recommends badge. When I finally got my Sonos home theater system up, my jaw dropped at the richness and depth of the jungle noises in Land of Bad. (Bomb go boom!)

And yet, this feeling of frustrated disappointment is oddly familiar. My family used to be a fully Sonos household, with Play speakers extending throughout our home and out to my husband’s workshop. I ditched the Play system in 2020 because I could no longer deal with the company’s decision to split its controller software into two separate Sonos apps, one for new speakers, and one for legacy speakers. Why do I need to do some mental math to remember which app controls which speaker every time I want to change the music?

Yet here I am again, held hostage by hardware, stranded by software, unable to edit my Sonos playlists until September. Maybe I’m just another foolish beautiful dreamer. At least my Roku TV still works.

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