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Johnny Rico
Chromatic Producer I
Jan 14, 2025 11:23 PM UTC

As one of the earliest Sonos adopters who has spent a lot of money on their products over the many years, this app debacle was a real gut punch. And particularly, the way it torpedoed my particular use case, which is the local music library and display of album art (only recently fixed), was an unbelievable slap in the face to a loyal customer. As a retired software developer, I believe that the app developers didn’t want to release that app, and that they were forced to do it by management. I’ve seen it over and over: non-tech people insisting on unrealistic schedules and just waving off the objections of the developers, like the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. Upon hearing the news that Spence was out, I was unsurprised but unmoved. This app debacle has turned me from a loyal fan to someone who doesn’t care much anymore. What they put their customers through should be unsurvivable for a company. I guess we’ll see if all the blather is just hot air or if anyone in Sonos still remembers the company I remember. Not holding my breath.

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    kassey22000
    Enthusiast II
    Jan 14, 2025 11:35 PM UTC

    Interim CEO has got rid of Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, the guy who told us how brave Sonos were being.  The whole position is being removed, which is quite a call.

    As was said right at the beginning, there will be case studies about all of this and how Sonos mis-handled it all, including Spence telling us how great the App was and how he'd been using it for months without issue.  It was always only a matter of time before he went.

    https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/14/24343873/sonos-product-officer-maxime-bouvat-merlin-leaving

    My favorite comment so far from this article is from: buddyrich33  It reflects my understanding of how far they screwed the pooch with this new approach:

    The underlying architecture of the new app that centralized all music service requests to Sonos servers first (that then sent requests to the music services directly and funnels results back through it - inserting itself as a middle man for no good reason) and synchronizes control commands (even if they still also run locally) to the cloud almost guarantees it will never be as performant as the old app. Until that changes, any changes to the app will be putting lipstick on a pig, even if it fixes all of the bugs, and restores all missing features.buddyrich33
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