Back in May, Sonos launched aredesigned versionofits app, garnering a lot of complaints from customers due to missing features and bugs. Not long after, the company doubled down on the overhauled app, with the chief product officer tellingThe Vergeit took “courage” to build a new app from scratch. But now, two-and-a-half months later, Sonos is apologizing for the flawed rollout.
5 top things to know about Sonos' new app
The company’s biggest redesign has arrived with some major listening-first interface changes.
Patrick Spence opens with an apology
Spence also shared a roadmap
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence published ablog posttoday, which opened with an apology.
“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 Spence. He went on to say that fixing the app is currently the company’s “number one priority.”
Sonos has been releasingsoftware updatesapproximately every two weeks, releasing features and fixing bugs incrementally since the release of the overhauled app. Some of these fixes include fixing a crashing issue on application launch for Android devices and software update screens blocking access to the rest of the app, and re-adding features like adding and editing alarms a week after the redesign launched.
Spence wrote in his July blog post that “since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.” This begs the question: why didn’t the app launch with those features? One could speculate that it was rushed to precede the launch of theSonos Aceheadphones, which are only compatible with the new version of the app, and that the timeline of the launch was prioritized over functionality, but none of that has been confirmed.
Needless to say, many customers were very annoyed with the way the app was launched, withReddit userscalling the relaunch a downgrade, asking for more transparency from Sonos, and begging for basic features to be brought back as soon as possible.
In his blog post, Spence laid out the planned prioritized software updates and in which months they’ll be rolling out, including improved stability when adding new products and overall system stability, improving volume responsiveness, improving alarm consistency and reliability, and bringing back edit mode for playlists and queues. Updates are expected to be rolled out on a bi-weekly basis as before.
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