Sonos has had an interesting year so far. The company received widespread praise for its first ever pair of headphones, the excellent Sonos Ace, then alienated most of its userbase with an app redesign in May.
Despite insisting it took "courage" to build the new app from scratch, the bugs and glitches persisted and Sonos has been forced to issue update after update (every two weeks, in fact) to try and fix the problem. Like reintroducing features it inexplicably deleted in the first place. Now, just over two months later, the company's CEO has issued an apology for the fiasco and said that fixing it is Sonos' "number one priority".
"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," wrote CEO Patrick Spence in a July blog post.
"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."
Spence goes on to detail something of a roadmap for the company. He states that July through to September will consist of improving stability, implementing configurations to the music library and adding UI improvements based on feedback. In September, Sonos plans to improve Alarm consistency and reliability while October could bring a restored edit mode for playlists and the queue and further improved functionality in settings.
He adds that Sonos will continue to add software updates bi-weekly and share notes on what's been addressed on the company's community page. Spence finishes the post with the admission "we know we have work to do to earn back your trust and we are working hard to do just that".
As a Sonos user, it's been infuriating to see the company's software issues drag down its fantastic hardware products. I've lost count of the number of times the app has crashed, randomly paused what I'm playing (or not started it at all) and generally just been unresponsive and a pain to use.
My colleague Scott Younker, who has also reported on Sonos' woes, said the app on his Android device has become noticeably slower and more frustrating to use. That's not to mention the bizarre decisions to omit the ability to edit playlists and upcoming song queues.
So understandably, Sonos has a long way to go before it's back in the good graces of its millions of users. I can't say for sure, but I'm reasonably confident most people, if given the choice, would want less superfluous features and more rock solid reliability. After all, Sonos' hardware continues to be some of the best you can buy and the purpose of the app is to support that as best it can. Right now, it's doing a terrible job.
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