- 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.
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.