The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

Here’s my feedback to your senior team: I’ve been a UK customer since ~2008 but this is the sour cherry on an increasingly stale cake. I’m done.

We set out to create a more personalized and effortless listening experience with the updated Sonos app. It was rebuilt from the ground up to ensure it could support future innovation in the years to come. For its initial rollout, we focused on how we could answer some of the most common requests from our customers, including increased reliability, performance, and faster access to music.

Many of you have shared valuable feedback on both the improvements that have made your experience better, as well as the areas where we fell short. We are listening to all of your comments and working to address them as quickly as possible. Over the coming weeks, we will reintroduce the below features, while fixing bugs and performance issues. Thank you for your engagement and we look forward to building upon this first step to create a listening experience that meets everyone’s needs.
 

• Screen reader for visually impaired customers: May 21
• Adding and editing alarms: May 21
• Adding to queue and playing next: early June
• Sleep timer: mid-June
• Local music library search and playback: mid-June 
• Update Wi-Fi settings: mid-June

Hi Keith. I’m sorry you are having a rough day. 
 

I would like to share that this response makes me feel even angrier, because you have continued to justify your actions and clarify when the things you broke will be fixed. What you did not say is “I am sorry”.

I wrote previously that In order for you to begin to recover from what you have done, if it is even possible, you should start by imagining a similar situation with other daily appliances. Your appliance company calls you and says “we have a small routine update we need to make to your home appliances, we can apply the fix remotely. We’ll come by tonight”. 

You come home and the the dishwasher looks the same, but doesn’t actually wash dishes correctly anymore, it is missing the cycles you use every day, and no longer has a timer function so it can run at night. Your family don’t know how to operate it and it is messing up your home routines and schedules.  The oven only now cooks with some of the modes, and has completely removed the timer feature you use every day to cook meals with your family. The refrigerator / freezer temperatures are wrong, you can’t change them, and you are spoiling food and the freezer is thawing and no longer makes ice. When you call to find out what is going on, you are told how great the new experience is. That this was deliberate. There is no way to go back, but that these features will probably come back in the coming months. Until then, there is nothing you can do about it - although feel free to post on our support forums.

Now ask yourself “How would I personally feel if someone did this to me, in my own home, with my own things, without my consent, and then refuses to immediately fix it?” 

If you are like most people, you will probably find yourself saying “I would be very angry. I would want the people that did that to be very sorry, to really mean it, for them to fix it and make amends if they could. Even still, I’d want for there to be consequences.” 

To be clear, this is far far worse than the S1/S2 debacle. People had time to react, and so you were able to recover - but it made your long time customers doubt you. Unfortunately, Patrick already promised that you wouldn’t do anything like it again. He said “If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience.” You broke your promise. 

I am going to hope that this is not a mortal self-inflicted wound to your company. It may be, depending on each of your ability to accept responsibility what you did, for how you behaved after the harm was evident, and what you do now.