Sonos CEO Promises Its App Will No Longer Suck

The Sonos app isn’t good and shouldn’t come off too much as a shock if you’ve used it recently. But an update around two months ago made the app even more unusable than usual. The community was, of course, not happy at all. Yesterday, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence finally released a much-awaited statement apologizing for the downgraded experience and outlined a plan for how the company intends to fix it.

There were several issues with the old app. According to user complaints, one joked that “it’s so brutal. Changing a WiFi network is harder than launching a satellite.”

Another common complaint was that removing songs from the playlist you’re listening to requires you first to change the song that’s currently playing.  Some users commented that the constant updates tended to break the app. Others said it sometimes takes up to 30 minutes to connect it to Spotify, only for them to move the speaker to another room and then be unable to reconnect it.

You could ditch the Sonos app and switch to AirPlay via your TV instead. However, that’s not an ideal alternative, as you lose Dolby Atmos when you use AirPlay instead of the native Sonos software. AirPlay automatically downgrades your audio from spatial to stereo. Other (more frustrated) folks said they’re giving up on Sonos hardware instead.

Spence’s apology statement from yesterday probably gave some of these consumers hope. He began by deeply apologizing about the experience and said, “There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down.” He explains that the redesigned app aimed to improve the overall UX. However, the company encountered technical issues that delayed its initial plans to work on the UI and “incorporate missing features and functionality.”

He also mentions that the app has seen regular software updates every two weeks since May 7 and provides a list of the areas Sonos wishes to work on in upcoming updates. In July and August, the company will work on software stability when adding new products to it and improving music library configuration, browse, search, and play. August and September will see enhancements to volume responsiveness (consumers complained that the app didn’t have a numerical value for volume), overall system stability, and general UI-related issues.

Sonos reserved September to improve alarm consistency and reliability following user complaints that their alarms would not go off on the redesigned app. In October, it plans to restore edit mode for playlists and the queue and improve the functionalities offered in settings.

Patrick closes the statement by promising that the software updates will be released every two weeks, along with notes on the areas they have touched on with each update.