What Every Tech Company Should Learn From Sonos’s App Fiasco

The story of Sonos’s recent app rollout will probably one day be a business school case study on how not to introduce a significant software update. But there are other lessons that companies and consumers should take away from the situation too.

Sonos’ decision to overhaul its Sonos S2 application seemed to stem from good intentions. It wanted to modernize and streamline the user interface and allow for greater user customization. There was also speculation that at least some backend changes had to be introduced to pave the way for the then-yet-to-be-announced Sonos Ace Headphones. 

Unfortunately, Sonos also failed to clearly communicate that the update would remove, at least temporarily, a variety of features many of its core fans loved. 

The surprise didn’t go over well with the community. As ire and outrage built, Sonos, much to its credit, made a concerted effort to engage with irritated users and formulate a rapid response. Staffers hosted a community “Ask Me Anything” on the company’s own forum system, where enough grievances were aired for a lifetime’s worth of Festivuses.

Sonos

Adding to the testiness, in a statement provided to Chris Welch at The Verge, Sonos Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin in a Phil Schiller-esque move, stated that “it takes courage” to rethink a core product, especially doing so “knowing it may require taking a few steps back” initially to improve more in the future. 

Actions speak louder than words, as they say, though. True to its promises to improve the situation, Sonos has now released two updates to the app that address at least some of the community’s gripes about missing features and frustrating bugs. 

A broken voiceover accessibility feature that limited visually impaired users’ engagement with the new app has now been restored. Bugs related to local network permissions, adding new products, and enabling surround and sub audio have also been addressed. Crucially, the ability to play content from your local music library is back too. 

In its blog post covering the update, Sonos also outlined the roadmap for what it will address next “coming soon,” including adding music to the queue and the ability to set sleep timers in the mobile app—the latter of which Sonos says is doable now, but only via the web app or voice control.

@sonos

Not surprisingly, many disgruntled users responded to Sonos’s X post announcing the updates with continued cynicism and rage.  But a few also appear to acknowledge that Sonos’s is listening to its customers, at least trying to set things right. 

I know many consumers will justifiably feel that companies don’t deserve credit for cleaning up the messes they create. We should also all be irate by the growing tech trend of publicly releasing products before they’re ready.

From my POV though, getting any major corporation to acknowledge failures directly is so rare that I can applaud Sonos for showing a different form of courage in taking its lumps, engaging with its customer base, and working quickly to try and improve the situation. 

Just consider another audio hardware news headline this week from Spotify. The music streaming service announced that its experiment with hardware, a.k.a. the Car Thing, would become inoperable on December 9th, despite only going out of production in 2022. It also has no plans to issue buyers refunds.

More famously, there’s Apple’s “bendgate” and “antennagate” hardware issues, both of which the company at least initially tried to attribute to user error and misuse. 

The AI hardware startup Humane shipped a $699 pin that barely functioned as promised right out of the gate. In response to the initial reviewer criticism, Humane’s head of product engineering simply lamented the social media landscape’s preferences for “hot takes” while downplaying the pin’s struggles by saying, “There is no perfect product.” 

None of these are exact twins to Sonos’s situation, but they do illustrate the same fact. Admitting failure and working to do right by customers isn’t a page you’ll find in many tech companies’ playbooks.

So, as much as the tech world can learn about what not to do from Sonos’s botched app launch, we’ll be lucky if other tech companies handle failure like Sonos has, too. 

Related Topics