Key Takeaways
- Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologized for the flawed app release.
- Software updates have been released to fix bugs and add missing features.
- Customers are expressing their dissatisfaction and demanding transparency and improvements to basic features.
In May, Sonos released a redesigned version of its app, which drew numerous complaints from customers due to missing features and bugs. Shortly after, the company focused on a completely revamped app, with its chief product officer telling The Verge that it took “courage” to build a new app from scratch. But now, two and a half months later, Sonos is apologizing for the flawed release.
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Patrick Spence begins with an apology
Spence also shared the roadmap.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence published a blog post today that began with an apology.
“I know many of our users experienced significant issues with our new app, which was released on May 7th. First, I want to personally apologize for letting you down,” Spence wrote, adding that fixing the app is now the company’s “top priority.”
Since the launch of the revamped app, Sonos has released software updates roughly every two weeks to gradually release features and fix bugs. These fixes include fixing a crashing issue on launching the application on Android devices, a problem where the software update screen prevented access to the rest of the app, and re-adding features like adding and editing alarms a week after the redesign was released.
“Since launch, we have identified several issues. As we fixed these issues, our original plans to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality have been delayed,” Spence wrote in a July blog post. This begs the question: why didn’t the app launch with those features? One could speculate that in the rush to get ahead of the launch of Sonos Ace headphones, which are only compatible with the new version of the app, launch timeline took priority over functionality, but neither of these have been confirmed.
Needless to say, many customers were extremely unhappy with the way the app was released, with Reddit users calling the re-release a downgrade and pleading for more transparency from Sonos and for basic functionality to be restored as soon as possible.
In a blog post, Spence outlined the planned priority software updates and the months they will be rolling out, including improved stability when adding new products and overall system stability, improved volume responsiveness, more consistent and reliable alarms, and the return of playlist and queue editing mode. Updates will continue to be rolled out every two weeks.
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