We wanted to take a moment to address concerns regarding our new app that launched in May. At Sonos, delivering an exceptional experience is paramount to all that we do. Unfortunately, your experiences over the past several weeks have fallen short of our commitment to you.
Today, our CEO Patrick Spence published a letter that includes a detailed update on the progress we’ve been making and plans going forward. You can read the full letter here.
We sincerely appreciate your patience and continued support. We are working hard to earn back your trust and are more committed than ever to delivering a consistently great Sonos experience for everyone.
Thank you all for your patience, Your Sonos Team
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I use my Sonos system for surround when watching TV. The system started muting randomly around the time of this App update. At first I thought something was wrong with my Network. It seems this App update is the root of the problem, but it is not clear from the letter - I only get that impression when reading these forums. The letter talks about an update that will “improve volume responsiveness” - will that update fix the problem of random muting? Can someone confirm that this software update impacts more than just usage of the app, but functionality of the speakers & systems themselves? It sounds like that’s the case from these forums, but the letter does not make that clear. I’m having problems with my system and wasting a lot of time reading these forums. When reading through the problems users are experiencing, the apology letter does not appear to acknowledge the extent of what’s going on here, and it is frustrating to wade through so much commentary to come to the conclusion that the software update is likely the source of my problem, but it is not clear when or if a fix will come.
Thanks for nothing Mr Spence!!!
Both my legacy S1 system/equipment and my house wide S2 system are kaput! Useless lumps of plastic and metal that cost thousands and now do not function. Fit for use as glorified door stops and little else!
Ive spent countless hours following Sonos guidance and tried the help service many times. Through gritted teeth I logged onto chat and also phoned in the hope one might achieve me contact with a person! The phone was another 15 people to wait for when I finally got someone on chat having waited for half an hour, and I then spent the next 2.5 hours with a technician trying to get some results. I had to leave the chat after all that time and still only have a part functioning system. I guess it will take quite a few more hours online to get more of it working although how much depends on where you get to with your fortnightly releases.
You have placed my investment of time, large sums of money aswell as countless hours digitising hundreds of albums in jeapordy yet again! The first time was when you wanted people to scrap their equipment as it would not work with a new App. It took months of pleading for the company to agree to have both S1 and S2 apps.
You then release this ‘new app’ without warning or adequate internal testing full of bugs.
Finally it emerges that this new app has restricted functionality as well as being full of bugs. I can only assume this was because you ran out of time for its release to coincide with your new Ace product!
Well it simply is neither good enough or acceptable. Customers buy your expensive products in good faith and expect them to work! We also do not expect you to release software that junks the product nor make decisions about software that leave your customers high and dry!
Why you want to drip feed functionality whilst people still sit here with kaput systems I don’t know, as rolling back to the last working app versions would seem to be the obvious answer until you have a proper functioning beta to test on a small sample.
I and I dare say countless others have lost faith and trust in Sonos. I do not wish to be a guinea pig any longer nor have you in charge of my investment, as you seem to make poor decisions that do not align well with your customers objectives!
So can I have a fully functioning app please or my money back for the equipment. You have no right to fill my equipment with defective software, and you owe your customers a duty of care, which you have again breached.
Please confirm which it is to be, as you have left my equipment in a defective state which is wholly unacceptable.
I spent thousands of dollars on Sonos products and the * doesn’t work.
If the CEO and developer team would have been as efficient applying their “Code of Conduct”, now we would all have a product that works and make us access all the music we want in the way we want!!!
Is it time to do an apple and bring back the founder of the company to sort things out. Sonos seem to be heading the same way as blackberry did.
Hardly a surprise given the previous role of the CEO! BlackBerry got too big for its boots and they were wiped out by bad internal decision making which allowed the competition to move around and ahead of them
This seems relevant to the situation Sonos risk finding themselves in. Obviously it's not an exact analogue, but the parallels seem clear.... Pt 1/3
Pt 2/3
Pt 3/3
100% of companies it happens to say that they never thought it could happen to them.
Their share price performance since May says it all! They simply need to listen which the CEO seems remarkably poor at doing. A little humility and less ego might help the company more than this stupid pig headed approach of just words that mean nothing apart from ‘I’m gonna do what I say we do not what customers want’. Your time will come Mr Spence, I hope you will remember what your customers are asking for when that time comes!
Tempted to buy a share just to raise these issues at the shareholders meetings!
Their share price performance since May says it all! They simply need to listen which the CEO seems remarkably poor at doing. A little humility and less ego might help the company more than this stupid pig headed approach of just words that mean nothing apart from ‘I’m gonna do what I say we do not what customers want’. Your time will come Mr Spence, I hope you will remember what your customers are asking for when that time comes!
Tempted to buy a share just to raise these issues at the shareholders meetings!
People say that, but then don’t. Why not, when it’s so cheap?
I think another aspect here that would concern me is the delayed impact on hardware sales. If the app had been bricked for a few weeks, it might have been ok. But we’re now looking at six months for issues to be fixed. If you’re selling this stuff in a shop, you can’t hide the fact that the kit doesn’t work because the app is messed up. I suspect there is worse to come for the overall financial impact on Sonos.
To jun_man’s comments, I agree, I am looking to upgrade some older speakers and for first time I am considering alternatives to Sonos e.g. Apple / Bose (an unexpected position)…
I think another aspect here that would concern me is the delayed impact on hardware sales. If the app had been bricked for a few weeks, it might have been ok. But we’re now looking at six months for issues to be fixed. If you’re selling this stuff in a shop, you can’t hide the fact that the kit doesn’t work because the app is messed up. I suspect there is worse to come for the overall financial impact on Sonos.
It will be interesting to see what impact on sales have been when the remaining financial product for the year come in and if there is a definite visible one outside of the usual seasonal changes.
What I hadn’t realised was just how many single product households there are with Sonos products. According to the Q2 report 6M, that’s 40% of Sonos households only have a single product. In my mind that is most likely close to 40% of users who never use the Sonos app after setup. So the many app issues are likely irrelevant if they’re using airplay/bluetooth/connect client and initial setup works. I’m not even sure why anyone would even pay the Sonos premium for just 1 device.
Even the multi device average is only 4.4 devices across 9M (60%) of households. If you consider a stereo pair or soundbar + sub puts someone in that group, and even a surround setup is only 4 devices I wonder how evenly spread it is across the total households to be reach that level.
Maybe the multi product household increase will drop and conversion of existing single to multi product rates will drop, but new single devices are barely affected.
I’d say the bigger knock on effect the longer significant issues drag out, is people who have spent more money on multi room setups will actually look elsewhere the longer they have an issue that isn’t resolved and also recommend to others to avoid Sonos. So what Sonos class as their affluent households market could start to shrink. I’m thinking custom install, the top arc surround package, whole house/multiroom purchase in a single purchase rather than piecemeal.
Only time will tell, but the Q4 report will likely give a better longer term impact view than a Q3 report.
What about IKEA? It’s a small company in the world… do they like to sell bricks for a lot of money???
Does someone have a contact at ikea to call to discuss what kind of * they re-sells?
I am very angry and upset; not only has my problem not been solved, but now Sonos is forcing the app to be updated. I managed to get it working using an old version of the app, but since yesterday it tells me I must update it. It is outrageous; I have worked in a digital company (banking) for 5 years and the appreciation and respect we have for our customers in no way resemble the disdain Sonos shows us by having an app that doesn't work and doesn't solve anything. What am I supposed to do with my devices? I have 3 Sonos speakers serving as paperweights. What should I do? Damn it.
Hello everyone,
We wanted to take a moment to address concerns regarding our new app that launched in May. At Sonos, delivering an exceptional experience is paramount to all that we do. Unfortunately, your experiences over the past several weeks have fallen short of our commitment to you.
Today, our CEO Patrick Spence published a letter that includes a detailed update on the progress we’ve been making and plans going forward. You can read the full letter here.
We sincerely appreciate your patience and continued support. We are working hard to earn back your trust and are more committed than ever to delivering a consistently great Sonos experience for everyone.
Thank you all for your patience, Your Sonos Team
Hello everyone,
We wanted to take a moment to address concerns regarding our new app that launched in May. At Sonos, delivering an exceptional experience is paramount to all that we do. Unfortunately, your experiences over the past several weeks have fallen short of our commitment to you.
Today, our CEO Patrick Spence published a letter that includes a detailed update on the progress we’ve been making and plans going forward. You can read the full letter here.
We sincerely appreciate your patience and continued support. We are working hard to earn back your trust and are more committed than ever to delivering a consistently great Sonos experience for everyone.
Thank you all for your patience, Your Sonos Team
I am the (formerly) proud (Android) owner of an arc, Gen 2 sub, gen 2 beam, and a submini. Prior to this update brouhaha, the ace headphones and the move2 were on my bucket list; but for now and the foreseeable future, they've moved over to my shit list! Just finished reading the CEO's rosy "update- update" ... If this was a mea culpa, he obviously wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful! "You WILL continue to use this app version, and ONLY this app version, until WE say OTHERWISE!"
Our experiences haven't "fallen short of your commitment to us"... your COMMITMENT has fallen short of your commitment to us!
I love @SONOS and love the CEO making a statement. The issue I have is that Patrick states that when the app was released you “found” a number of issues. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that you literally removed features people used every day. That was a deliberate decision by the developers. So, the apology rings hollow because this statement makes it sound like a software bug and not an oversight or a conscious decision.
It is also a deliberate decision NOT to reinstate the old S2 app while they’re still trying to figure out all the bugs in the new app. I haven’t heard anything in all the apologizing that says why they can’t bring back the old app in the meantime. Maybe there are are reasons why that’s not possible, but they haven’t said what those were. It seems from these threads that there would be a lot of people made happier if they just brought the old app back. And why can’t that happen . . . like . . . yesterday? Apologizing is fine, but remedial action is better.
Why would Sonos deliberately release such a BS app that it's basically bricked all of my gear?!?! Just turn back the dial on the app! This is worse when switching from S1 to S2. Because now none of my * works properly - that had worked flawlessly for years!
Sonophone will let you play music much easier than the Sonos app but beware that it will not do “admin” things such as grouping speakers. It plays music to existing groups of speakers very well and is very responsive but you will still need to use the Sonos app for things beyond just playing music. For me it was $4 well spent considering I still can’t see all of my Spotify playlists in the Sonos app… but I can using Sonophone.
In reply to some of the posts here, I suspect they won’t roll-back to the previous version because it didn’t accommodate the new headphones.
I use Sonopad now, and it’s great. Would never go back to the S2 app for regular playing of music. I sure at some point the new app becomes usable, however.
