- Sonos’s botched app rollout is a significant leadership failure, resulting in widespread customer dissatisfaction and technical issues that undermine its brand.
- Over 100 employees were laid off, likely due to the mishandling of the app, reflecting poor leadership priorities and decisions.
- Sonos now faces potential long-term damage to its customer loyalty and market confidence, with upcoming updates needing to address these issues urgently.
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I love how laying off like wage slaves is thought of as a solution lol
lEaDerShIP
When Sonos first came out, they had this really easy to use, standalone device. It had a track wheel like the old iPods, buttons, and a color display. That made it easy for non-tech people to browse and choose what to play. Then they decided to drop that and go the app route. It’s been downhill ever since.
I had been meaning to check if they had unfucked everything.
Sounds like no.
It took me 2 solid hours to find a work around to get my parent’s speaker working again. Thanks Sonos!
I have a Sonos speaker, and the fact that I’m forced to use their app that still sucks has definitely caused me to look elsewhere for my next similar device.
What do you use the app for? I used it for initial setup and setting alarms, but haven’t tried the new app yet. I mostly use the Spotify app over airplay to play on SONOS, or Alexa
Because of their dumb spat with Google, I can’t connect my Android devices to it via Cast. So if you use Android at all, you have to do all your searches and such through the Sonos app, which is laid out so horribly.
ETA: and I’m not buying an iPhone just so I can have a better user experience that used to work before they intentionally broke it.
At least Spotify has a built in button to just select one of their speakers, so you can use that one to bypass their shitty app.
That said, I don’t think you can select multiple speakers, which kind of defeats the purpose of a multi room sound system. So yeah, I haven’t uninstalled their app and get annoyed as fuck every time I have to use it.
They deserve what they get. Obviously, they didn’t take consumer loyalty seriously, and now they’re reaping the consequences.
Somebody much smarter than me needs to hack this system. I’d pay to support it.
It’s beyond BS that functionality gets deleted from a product I purchased. I knew the risk of investing into an ecosystem that “required” an app to work. Shame on me, I get what I deserve I guess. Still doesn’t make it right.
The new app sucks, but that’s been true for quite some time. I have a bunch of older Sonos stuff that’s still runs their old ‘S1’ app. It works perfectly. When I need to add a zone I buy old hardware on eBay that is still S1 compatible. What this article doesn’t mention but should, is the newer versions of the new app have a much less robust privacy policy and even more stuff is being done through their cloud. It’s not necessary, it doesn’t help user experience, it just gives more data to harvest, and it’s not what consumers want.
It’s good that they are trying to right the ship. But this article nails it on the head, whatever they are doing now is way too late. Management that’s not asleep at the switch would have seen these problems before the app even launched and slammed on the brakes lest they destroy their company to get a pair of headphones out the door. And that’s exactly what they did. The trust of users is broken, that’s not easily repaired. They shipped their headphones but nobody gave a shit because the app made people want to get rid of Sonos entirely.
It’s too bad Logitech discontinued the Squeezebox line. At the time that was the biggest competitor to Sonos, they could be cleaning up right now.
