Malcolm Owen
After its summer iPhone app update fiasco, and a series of mostly-broken promises to fix it, Sonos is again trying to win back shaken customer confidence.
Sonos hasn't had the best 2024, because of its ham-fisted approach to overhauling its app. After multiple apologies, the smart speaker maker is making a bigger statement, this time trying to convince users that it will move forward with its customers in mind.
The whole affair started in April with the announcement of its overhauled iOS controller app arriving on May 7. The app redesign aimed to streamline the experience of accessing content, paring down the home screen and removing tabs in favor of a single page approach.
Since then, Sonos has been trying to apologize to wronged consumers, culminating in a new page on its website and a YouTube video.
The page, titled "Recommitting to Quality and Customer Experience," is a lengthy admittance that it failed customers. Followed by a lot of insisting that it will get things right next time, and in the future too.
"We fell short when our new app release didn't meet the standards we promised," the page starts. It then claims Sonos has "spent time listening to our customers and employees, learning from our mistakes, and taking action."
The page goes on to outline "new commitments to show our renewed focus on software quality, customer experience, and delivering the excellence you deserve from Sonos."
That opening statement is then accompanied by a three-minute video of CEO Patrick Spence talking directly to the camera about the commitments. For an apology video, it has all the gravitas that the start of a redemption tour written in Notes with a screencap posted to X has.
The (new) Commitments
Sonos outlines seven new commitments and initiatives that it hopes will earn back customer trust. For some, they will hopefully avoid Sonos embarking on changes that created the PR mess in the first place.
The top is an "Unwavering Focus on Customer Experience," in that it will not launch products until they meet quality benchmarks established at the start of product development.
This is followed by "Increasing the Stringency of Pre-Launch Testing," which will include "a broader range of customers and more diverse setups."
The third, "Approaching Change with Humility" sounds a bit hand-wavy, but really it's Sonos saying it will be making major changes more gradually. This will mean it has more chance to get customer feedback before the changes become the default.
This is pertinent, as amid the app unrest, Spence did admit that the app couldn't be rolled back to a previous and more usable state. Sonos had apparently gone too far in adjusting various software elements that it couldn't reverse course.
The fourth commitment, "Appointing a Quality Ombudsperson," sounds important but could easily not be that useful. A new role of Quality Ombudsperson will be made, who will "ensure employees have a clear path to raise concerns regarding quality and customer experience."
That person will report directly to executive leadership, publish reports twice a year, and "present regularly to the Sonos board of directors." Of course, whether the board and leadership will actually listen to complaints is a different matter.
The remaining commitments are to help regain consumer trust. The first and easiest being the extension of the manufacturer's warranty for any existing under-warranty home theater and speaker products by one year.
For the app, Sonos promises "Relentless App Improvement," with updates to the app every two to four weeks. It plans to do this "even after the current issues are fully resolved."
It will also be establishing a Customer Advisory Board, which will "provide feedback and insights from a customer perspective." Again, this will only work if leadership actually listens to complaints.
No bonuses, kind of...
So that the management at Sonos can really learn from their mistakes, there's a financial element too. The page adds that the Sonos Executive Leadership Team "will not accept any annual bonus payout for the October 2024-September 2025 fiscal year."
This isn't an entire bonus blackout, as there's a massive caveat. They'll still get bonuses if "the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust."
Indeed, Sonos boasts that "more than 80% of the app's missing features have been reintroduced, and the company expects to have almost 100% restored in the coming weeks."
Considering Sonos is signing up to issue app updates and fixes every few weeks, and is effectively bribing customers with a warranty extension, those bonuses won't be gone for long. Especially since it can define the line it must reach for the payouts.
As the latest in the continuing Sonos apology tour, the measures are what you would expect a large company to offer to consumers. It's beyond a simple apology and is a very sizable declaration that it will do better in the future.
However, it has taken over four months to reach this point. You'd normally expect this sort of offering to be issued from a company within weeks of the discovery of wrongdoing, if not days.
We've had months of waiting for Sonos to fix the app, and it's still not done. Even Sonos admits that.
Even the promise that higher-ups won't get bonuses has a lot of wiggle room. It seems to be a punishment, but one that could easily be circumvented so that the top people still get their money.
It's the biggest apology from Sonos so far, but it remains to be seen whether the promises are earnest or just for show. Right now, we're betting on the latter.
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
3 Comments
I am one of the early adopters of Sonos. I understand they wanted to bring the new Sonos infrastructure technology to aging limited microcontrollers. However, at that time, they decided to pull the plug on our devices. So I'm either left with really great sounding "S1" bricks, or I cannot ever upgrade anything.
We got the option to purchase new devices with a steep discount. Still, having 8 devices in my home, that meant purchasing more than 2k$ worth of new devices.
I've had one broken driver so far, I repaired it (thank you Solen). Otherwise, it's been smooth sailing for me, except the very aged S1 app is borked for many things. I don't have Apple Music playlist names (they are all blanks), things are slowly degrading with the streaming service reliability with tracks failing to play here and there.
But at that point, I cannot purchase a new Sonos device even if I wanted to, I can only purchase an used one to add it to my aged S1 ecosystem. So I'm left with three choices: keeping the devices for as long as I could, upgrading all the devices to new Sonos devices ($$$), or migrating to something else.
Still, on the topic of the App, I have chances to use their app outside my own home, and they did a big FCP->FCPX Aperture->Photos move, but without having the core to absorb the very violent repercussions on their ecosystem. It's for the best, and the UI is much better, and I'm sure the code is way cleaner. But for a customer, it's unacceptable.
I would say honestly their long term customers are fed up with their antics. Newcomers in their world might be happy, but they are losing long-time devoted users through successive walls of mandatory migration that first cost them lots of money to upgrade their system, and then a wall of mandatory software update that broke their devices and made them unusable for a portion of their best power users.
I am wondering if they will be able to get that trust back, sincerely. Because the metric is loose enough, I'm sure the execs will all get their bonuses laughing to their company's grave.
And that's if anyone should actually still use Sonos. There's a market, but IMHO, it's constantly shrinking.
There are now really great sounding inexpensive bluetooth devices that can be connected to a computer or phone, HomePods. Great audiophile-grade wired devices can also be purchased for less than $100. So the attractiveness of Sonos is slowly migrating away as the years go by. Same than their Sonos Controller used to be a great idea, but everyone having phones meant having no reason to have a separate controller. Even them taking so long to put a simple bluetooth receiver for phone streaming means the cheap Anker mini loudspeaker can do something a pro Sonos device cannot in a home. So they haven't moved with the times. Yes, they got new devices, but it's harsh. Audiophiles all moved away to Bluesound, new ways of playing audio is now mostly through apps on phones, or computers, and once in a blue moon through wires, since the new Music / Spotify / D/Q/name it are actually awesome. And Youtube is a major provider of music too. Meaning the direct connection in Bluetooth or for the hardcore ones a wired device makes it good. The accounts are shared on every device, it's easy to set up a party room with a computer and connecting it Bluetooth. Synchronization of devices "party mode" is not that useful. Their 5.1 setup is very glitchy and has some lag (or no glitches are a lot of lag). I tried DJing with Sonos and it's worse than in huge arenas. Anyhow, TL;DR this paragraph: there's other better suited ecosystem of devices for modern usage.
Hopefully iOS 18 Photos app team feels the same way
as Sonos… we’ll do better next time.
The Sonos fiasco would be somewhat more forgivable if this were a case of, "Despite our best efforts, this happened." Hey, every company makes mistakes, right? But this was no mistake. This was no oversight. There was no shortage of Sonos employees warning, shouting even, that the new app wasn't ready, that the disaster which has come to pass WOULD happen, and they went ahead and released it to their user base anyway. And here we are, a half-year later, with nothing but a string of broken promises and a still not-fully-fixed app to show for it. Spare me the faux earnest apology/hostage video with a fake promise of no bonus, which only reinforces the idea that you believe Sonos customers are idiots who won't see through this.
If you're going to be a company that charges a very premium price for your products compared to the competition, and if the performance of those products depends on a properly working app, you simply DO NOT SHIP an alpha-level app to your user base and call it a finished product. All of these "new" commitments in the apology video are what your customers assumed you were committed to right along--this is why we pay premium prices for Sonos products. The idea that you now need to appoint a "Quality Ombudsmen" to insure that you don't ship shite to your customers again only speaks to your lack of confidence in a quality mindset being a core corporate value for everyone who works at Sonos. Also note that you ignored your employees who said the app wasn't ready, so why should we believe that slapping a quality title on an employee will make a difference?
I think this upcoming holiday season will determine if Sonos has a future as a company or not. I'm by no means writing them off, but if they can't get a bulletproof app finished within the next month, that's a huge problem. And if the holidays aren't solid for them, I could see the stock price falling off enough where some other company will buy them out.
Special note to new iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max owners: these phones have all new mics, for which Sonos TruePlay does not yet have a mic profile--and who knows how long it will take Sonos to get around to that?! A proper mic profile is really essential to TruePlay operating properly.