Sonos CEO apologizes for disastrous rollout of new app

The big Sonos app redesign was intended to make the company’s software more modern, customizable, and easier to use. But two months after its May release, it’s hard to look at this situation as anything but a colossal unforced error. Sonos has been steadily adding back missing features and functionality with frequent app updates, but the chorus of customer frustration isn’t going away.

To that end, CEO Patrick Spence today published a letter that covers the progress Sonos has made with the new app — and what customers can expect in the near future. It also contains Sonos’ first direct apology for the rough patch that “too many” users have gone through. Some customers have been waiting for that after the company’s initial responses (like saying the app overhaul took “courage”) came across as tone deaf given all the bugs and technical difficulties.

“I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Spence writes. “There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.”

He goes on to lay out the company’s software roadmap from now through October. Sonos is currently updating and improving the app every two weeks and has most recently addressed issues with local library playback. But some much-requested features — like the ability to edit the song queue from within the Sonos app — aren’t expected to be available until the fall.

In hindsight, it’s painfully obvious that Sonos should have released the rebuilt app as a beta for early adopters of the Sonos Ace headphones, which aren’t compatible with the previous version, and kept the existing software in place while bringing the two to parity. But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, so now the company is trying to work as fast as it can to make the new app deliver on everything it was designed to do.

Here’s Spence’s letter in full:

We know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app which rolled out on May 7, and I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you. There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.

We developed the new app to create a better experience, with the ability to drive more innovation in the future, and with the knowledge that it would get better over time. However, since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.

Since May 7, we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks, each making significant and meaningful improvements, adding features and fixing bugs. Please see the release notes for Sonos software updates for detailed information on what has been released to date.

While these software updates have enabled the majority of our customers to have a robust experience using the Sonos app, there is more work to be done. We have prioritized the following improvements in our next phase of software updates:

July and August:

Improving the stability when adding new products

Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play

August and September:

Improving Volume responsiveness

User interface improvements based on customer feedback

Improving overall system stability and error handling

September:

Improving Alarm consistency and reliability

September and October:

Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue

Improving functionality in settings

We plan to continue releasing new software updates on a bi-weekly cadence. With each release, we will share detailed notes on what we’ve addressed and what we’re working on next in our community.

We deeply appreciate your patience as we address these issues. We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and are working hard to do just that. I am always open to your feedback, you can find me via email at ceo@sonos.com.

Sincerely,

Patrick Spence

CEO