I doubt it would be much fun reading through Sonos CEO Patrick Spence’s customer emails from the past few weeks. The Sonos forums, and particularly the subreddit, have been abuzz ever since the company released a revamped mobile app built from the ground up to allow for greater personalization and improved performance. The new software shipped without a number of features that were present in the previous version. Core features like sleep timers and alarms were nowhere to be found. And local music search/playback was a mess—an insult to some of the company’s longtime customers.
In the immediate aftermath, Sonos remained stubborn, with the company’s chief product officer saying it took “courage” to introduce an entirely new user experience. This response, too, was not exactly well-received. All in all, the redesign has its supporters. Whether you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between depends entirely on your individual use case and how you typically use your Sonos system. Some people simply play music through their speakers using AirPlay or Spotify Connect and were completely unaware of this whole fiasco.
But it’s easy to see why many say their faith in Sonos has been shaken after suddenly and without warning they lost access to features just for hitting the update button. Rather than doing a public beta preview or temporarily offering the new app alongside the old one, Sonos forced everyone to switch over at once. (The Ace headphones and Roam 2 speaker wouldn’t have worked with the previous app.)
I’ve heard from private beta testers who told me they did their best to make the company understand that this app isn’t quite ready yet. I’ve also heard from a reliable source that Sonos customer support requests have skyrocketed since the redesign, so this is proving to be a difficult time on many levels. Unforgivably, the new app was also a step backwards in terms of accessibility, something the company worked quickly to address.
“I wish we had communicated the roadmap a little more clearly.”
Last week I spoke briefly with Spence about the new Sonos Ace headphones. As expected, he is very enthusiastic about them and believes the headphones live up to the Sonos brand in terms of sound quality, comfort and the outstanding TV Audio Swap feature.
But of course I had to address the app situation too. Spence has no regrets about Sonos taking the step back then, and says the company’s internal data shows that the benefits of the new app are very real and are being felt by (less vocal) customers.
Here is that part of our discussion:
Patrick Spence: There are two things that customers have been emailing me and giving me feedback about for years. One was headphones, the other was the app. I’d say probably the entire time I’ve been at Sonos, but since I became CEO, I’ve been hearing from customers saying, “The app needs to be easier and more modern to navigate. It needs to be more responsive and have lower latency,” and all of those things. I’ve been using it since Christmas. Everyone at Sonos has been testing it for months. It’s delivered – we know from data and feedback – that it’s easier to navigate. But it’s a change for customers. It’s faster and more responsive and a better experience overall.
“When you add a new feature to a platform, it can become the most important feature for a person.”
But of course there is a time when people have to adapt to that change and we are going through that time right now. We have the most passionate customers in the world. This architecture and everything we’ve done around the architecture allows us to move a little faster. We’ve basically taken a monolith and broken it down into modular pieces, which allows us to move faster in certain elements. Things like the alarm issue were a mistake, right? So we’ve been able to move faster than we have in the past. address it. And we will find more bugs over time. We are working hard to fix them.
I wish we had communicated the roadmap a little more clearly.
Chris Welch: The message was better worded: “These features will not be available at launch.”
P.S.: Exactly. And “here’s when they’re coming.” Because we already had a plan for how we were going to pull this off. But the “why now” was because it’s actually much easier to navigate, more responsive, and just a better overall experience, and that’s the most important thing for the 99 percent of customers you’ll never hear from as you go through it.
But we have to remember that we have the most passionate customers in the world. When you add a new feature to a platform – that’s the most important thing we always have to keep in mind at this stage – that feature can become the most important thing to one person, and that’s the most important thing to that person. I think it’s important to make sure we have a plan and communicate well about it. And we’ll get better as we go.
Just yesterday, Sonos pushed out another update to the new app, adding a handful of bug fixes related to accessibility, local music playback, and more, and providing a timeline for other improvements in the works. The company is no doubt hoping that in six months, all of this will be a distant memory, the new app will achieve the same feature set (and then some) as the software it replaced, and that the loyal customer base will forgive anything.
But for now, much of the community is still on edge because Sonos is about to release its Ace headphones, entering a huge new product category that could provide a growth spurt amid declining demand for speakers and soundbars.