Sonos workers shed light on why the app update went so horribly

In May, Sonos updated its mobile app—to the dismay of many users. With missing features and bugs, customers complained about a loss of functionality and hardware not working the way it should. As Sonos deals with the expensive repercussions, a report from Bloomberg today highlights how Sonos allowed the release of an update so buggy and incomplete as to overturn its goodwill with long-standing customers.

Illustrating how poorly this app update has gone, last month, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said the company would spend $20 million to $30 million in the short term to get the app where it needs to be (which is, basically, functioning as well as the predecessor) and rebuild customer and partner trust. Sonos also expects to miss its annual revenue target by $200 million. This is partially due to its delay of two hardware releases to focus on the app. Bloomberg noted that “Sonos shares are down 25% this year.” Annual bonuses and merit-based raises have also reportedly been canceled.

Outdated code

One reason for the app’s failure is the outdated code and infrastructure that the prior app was running on. Anonymous employees Bloomberg spoke with claimed that the Sonos app’s technical debt had been building up for 20 years before the update.

By the time Sonos decided to update the app in mid-2022, it was dealing with software based on virtually obsolete infrastructure and code languages. As such, the app update “was less about introducing new functionality than sorting out the existing mess,” Bloomberg reported.

After decades of the app’s inner workings growing stale, the impending release of Sonos’ long anticipated Ace wireless headphones, which came out in June, made the need for a new app both urgent and necessary. This is because the headphones were made to be on-the-go, differing from Sonos' other products, mainly speakers and soundbars relying on home Wi-Fi. This seems to align with comments that Spence made to investors in August. He said that the app update was "a redesign of the entire system—not only the app but also the player side of our system, as well as our cloud infrastructure—and this was a complex undertaking.”

In May, Bloomberg reported that Sonos aimed to release the new app "at least a few weeks" before Ace. At the time, Bloomberg said that the update was originally supposed to release in March but was delayed due to "software-engineering challenges."

Although it makes sense that Sonos' most mobile offering yet would need a more advanced, revamped app, it seems that the app's redesign could have been initiated earlier than the mid-2022 timeframe that Bloomberg reported. In addition to the years of technical debt that has been said to be built up, Sonos' headphones have been reported to be in development since at least 2019.

Chaos and frustration reportedly preceded app launch

Ahead of the app’s release and following company layoffs, Sonos Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin reportedly instituted company reorganizations that caused chaos, two former workers said. People who have been following this story may remember Bouvat-Merlin telling The Verge in May amid customer complaints that it "takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future." The comment didn’t go over well with customers whose gear stopped working as intended due to the app’s problems.

A former engineer told Bloomberg:

They separated people that had been working together for years creating great products. I don’t understand what could motivate someone to shake things up like that.

Employees Bloomberg spoke with claimed that internal frustrations were high close to the app's scheduled launch date because the app wasn't ready. Three former workers who recently worked there pointed to "yelling” and “screaming” in meetings as employees tried to warn higher-ups. Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when the app released. Spence admitted in August that many customers, “especially those with some of our older products in their systems, are having an experience that is worse than" before. Examples included “existing speakers missing from their Sonos systems,” “errors while setting up new products,” and latency, per Spence.

“They thought they were making such a big, bold decision. It was the wrong decision,” someone Bloomberg described as a “former senior employee” said. Additionally, two people told Bloomberg that one former employee who worked on the app said during a meeting that they were worried about losing their job if they kept questioning the app’s release.

Per Bloomberg, Spence asked Sonos lead counsel Eddie Lazarus to investigate what led to the app debacle. Speaking with about 24 “key employees,” Bloomberg reported, Lazarus reported his findings to Sonos at the end of July.

Enlarge / A promotional image for Sonos' app.
Sonos

Sonos’ head counsel said that Sonos created a list of “essential” bugs to fix before releasing the update but admitted:

Our list of essential bugs, obviously, was not comprehensive enough.

Lazarus disagreed with the idea of a “breakdown in culture,” as Bloomberg put it, driving the bad app's release. He noted that the app's release was pushed from early 2024 until May in response to employee concerns.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that Sonos should have waited until the app was on par with the experience long-time users have enjoyed for years before rolling it out. It’s possible that it would have delayed the release of the Ace headphones, which were supposed to help Sonos revive its revenue after a post-pandemic decline. But now Sonos is delaying two product launches because of its hastiness.

That said, Bloomberg reported that “angry” employees are not pushing for Spence’s removal because they think getting a new CEO would cause more delays. For his part, Spence has been engaging in user feedback on forums like Reddit and via a public email address. The email address used to receive a “few dozen” messages per week, Bloomberg reported. Since the botched app update, he’s been getting over 30,000 per week, according to an unnamed source.

It’s not over yet

Sonos has been updating its app biweekly in an effort to restore functionality and build back customer trust. Although Bloomberg reports that Sonos is planning to make the new app as good as the old one “fairly soon,” the damage to Sonos’ brand is expected to last for much longer.

In the meantime, the company has also laid off 100 people after disclosing the high costs associated with fixing its app and reputation. The company even explored relaunching the old app but determined that would only make matters worse.

Sonos may be on a path of remedy, but with employees highlighting various red flags that should have been spotted long before the app's release, it's hard to reconcile with the decisions made and the frustrations, both internal and external, those caused—and are still causing.