The fallout from the release of the redesigned and bug-ridden Sonos app has extended from the early months of May through the dog days of summer, as the company announced today (August 15) that it was laying off 100 employees.
The news of layoffs was first reported by The Verge, and confirmed by Tom's Guide.
In a statement to Tom's Guide, credited to Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, the company said, "We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6% of the company. This action was a difficult, but necessary, measure to ensure continued, meaningful investment in Sonos' product roadmap while setting Sonos up for long term success."
“Our continued commitment to the app recovery and delighting our customers remains our priority and we are confident that today’s actions will not impact our ability to deliver on that promise. Today, we are focused on our departing employees and ensuring they have the support they need," Spence added.
Apparently, the marketing department is bearing the brunt of this cutback.
It's the second round of layoffs that Sonos has had in the last two years, as it cut 7% of the workforce in June of 2023. At the time, it was reported that the layoffs were due to a significant revenue drop and a lowering of demand for Sonos' speakers.
This summer was supposed to be a triumphant one for Sonos as it released the aforementioned new app, the impressive new Ace headphones and even the powerful Roam 2 portable speaker.
Instead, Sonos outraged a fairly loyal community with the app redesign. The Sonos subreddit and the company's own forums and support pages were inundated with complaints and reports of a broken app, so much so that the company had to walk back a number of changes including bringing back features that were dropped in the redesign. It launched without a surprising lack of features like sleep timers, alarms and even playlist editing.
At the time, I found that my Android version of the app was extremely slow and at times wouldn't load or recognize speakers that were attached to the system. I will say that the app has improved for me, but that's not a universal truth.
Late last month, CEO Patrick Spence issued an apology for the disastrous app launch. "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."
He wrapped up the apology saying, "We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and we are working hard to do just that."
Sonos released a roadmap for repairing the app last month, and it sounds like the fix is ongoing.
The app redesign fiasco has been so bad that it's actually delayed the launch of new Sonos products, including a potential Arc soundbar successor called the Lasso. Spence admitted as much during a Q3 earnings call where he stated that fixing the app has become the company's number one priority.
Meanwhile, the community is again up in arms with multiple posts on the subreddit responding to today's news and calling for Spence to be the one who should go.
"Patrick needs to go immediately, we don't need another RIM/Blackberry situation due to prolonged incompetence. He should have been escorted out this morning too (or better yet, in May)," said Redditor _SB1_.
It definitely looks like Sonos' summertime woes will continue into the fall.
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