Sonos has addressed some of the issues with the new app. Here is one example:

Unfortunately one example doesn’t cut the mustard.  Neither does failing to advise or update consumers.  There’s plenty of very unhappy people out there with effectively a product that fails to meet its sales description.

don't believe Sonos quite understand the seriousness of this or how badly managed PR can destroy a company

There’s about 10 threads and hundreds of posts threatening a class action lawsuit.  Do I think any of those threats have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being carried out, never mind winning?  Of course not.  Do I think corporate lawyers tell the PR department and executives to shut their mouths when they see those threats?  I’d be stupid not to, nobody gets sued for not talking to the press.  So if you want better communication, tell your fellow posters to calm down on the silly rhetoric. 

Don’t know if it’s rhetoric?  Have you checked their one star rating on Trustpilot?  That’s a really bad sign.  

You can’t sue for a rating going down.  You need to show damages, and the rules around a software EULA vs. ownership make that very difficult.  Believe me, it’s rhetoric.  

Class action fever is just that. A lot of heat, tossing and turning, feeling rough and finally it subsides. Best you can hope for is you're left with some immunity to purchasing Sonos gear in the future. 

Better course of action, if you're really borked by all this, would be to make your experiences known to others, eg. Internet tech press reviews, potential customers and dealers. Lawyers are way down on the list of concerned parties. 

Most of the anger and fury here is like shouting alone in a padded cell. 

good turn of phrase, Class action fever will be cured when the app is mostly back to where it was in a month or two. But the internet remembers, and bad reviews tend to stick around long after. 

What would be interesting to know (but it'll be a commercial secret) are the figures for new sales, sales of headset, returns.  Guess we'll never know. 

Stock value has fallen, but that could be due to other reasons.  It’s a tough one. There are a lot of angry customers(me included) that feel Sonos management are not listening, and they continue to trot out words like “Brave” and “Courageous” when referring to the premature app release.  It will never be reversed, now that the deadphones have been released and that was likely the rush for the 7th May.

We can just hope that full functionality is restored asap, but it will take a lot longer...if ever, to restore trust.

What we can hope is that they, the exec team, have learnt a lesson from this.  We, the customers, may want to give Sonos a “bloody nose” over this BUT it is in all our interests that the company survives and thrives or we will have a set of Room based doorstops. 

I wouldn’t read too much into the short term/daily movement. If you look at the past 5 years, when the pandemic kicked in the stock price rose sharply, like many tech companies. With more people working from home I’d expect sales of home audio products to have increased, so there was a short artificial skew of sales. The tech market has been correcting since that passed, and the current price is higher than pre-pandemic.

We can just hope that full functionality is restored asap, but it will take a lot longer...if ever, to restore trust.

What we can hope is that they, the exec team, have learnt a lesson from this.  We, the customers, may want to give Sonos a “bloody nose” over this BUT it is in all our interests that the company survives and thrives or we will have a set of Room based doorstops.

Are there is the crux of the issue, individuals need to decide whether current and future purchases change or they hope it all gets better and Sonos survives and thrives, in which case they company has no real need to change how it operates if nothing unexpected happens.

Maybe the exec team already learnt during the S1/S2 split, so had a good idea of what was/is likely to happen with online noise vs actual impact. Like many older tech companies Sonos have the problem of a one off point of sale profit needing to cover current and future service development, operation, integration and support cost. Unless there is a significant impact to future sales and reduction of profit then what do think they need to learn?

As long as the CEO and the senior management meet or exceed the board and investor expectations, then you could argue they knew exactly what they were doing, even if some existing users don’t like it.

As I said in another thread, the Sonos bigwigs know the bunny never really gets it.  We had a poster log in the other day to tell everyone within earshot that they are “done with Sonos and never buying another thing from them”, using the same account they used 5 years ago to state that they were “done with Sonos and never buying another thing from them”.

This. I’ve seen  a lot of folks claiming the stock is down, sometimes throwing graphs of the past month or shorter time period, without looking at the 6 month or YTD to get a better idea of what’s actually going on.  That said, I expect that Sonos management wanted the stock market value to increase with release of the ‘most requested product ever’, so I wouldn’t take the stocks to mean things are going well, or not a disappointment.  It’s just not a predictor of doom, as far as I can tell.

Agree on this too.   There is some short term and long term damage to sales and the brand in general, but it’s hard to say what the best option in a bad situation is without more data.  The lessons that definitely should be learned though as to have better product and software development planning so that you don’t run into another situation like this again, if at all possible.

I did that with Best Buy (retailer) once years ago.  I forget the actual issue that I was upset about, but swore to never shop there again.  And I didn’t for a couple years, until I realized that Best Buy was just fine and I was making my life harder by not shopping at the most convenient tech store around me.  

In the rest of the world, which doesn't really get the American obsession with share prices, and class action lawsuits, there's more emphasis on warranty conditions, ethical business practices, and companies which respond to user and customer complaints.

Sonos is not doing so well on these factors.  Also, Sonos doesn't have such an overwhelming presence in Europe. 

Leadership is continuing to say “just trust me, we're gonna make a bunch of money on new products” 

They're not aiming those comments at us the consumers.

That should buy them 90 days with the actual target audience, e.g., board of directors.

I don’t think there is a lot of trust here for the CEO and the rest of of Sonos’ leadership.

Most of us just want to be able to use all of the speakers in our system with an app that allows us to access all of the functionality.

If they put things right quickly then some of the anger may subside.

But the continued lack of action and silence will open the door for competitors.