Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

Everyone makes mistakes. Sonos’s customer base is outraged, its share price has gone from the $19 range at the start of the year to sub-$14 now.

Investing for the future existing of the business is essential. Seeking growth is common. Doing so at the expense of a loyal customer base which itself offers upgrade and on-sell opportunities seems foolhardy. I’ll echo the sentiments many others have expressed - by all means develop a ground-up platform suitable for the next gen but don’t brick the devices of your previously loyal user base in order to do so. Given their demographics, they probably won’t respond well to becoming unwilling beta testers for a shockingly unready product. That’s not even reflecting on the serious money they’ve invested to merit such treatment.

As others have said - why the rush? Why nail all of our colours to the mast of your sinking ship? Why not push back the new app feature 3 months (hell, take 12!) and restore a version of the previous one where the essential core features work? Early adopters and the time-rich can do earl- access beta. There likely will be a time where technical dependencies and the overhead of managing 2 products in parallel gets too much and they need to be converged. It clearly wasn’t in April and it isn’t now. I appreciate that attitudes vary by culture but the “brave” thing to do is admit to a mis-judgement and re-plan. Right now, you’ve admitted to a mistake but committed us all to carry on with the death-march anyway. “Brave” is not the right word for that.

I feel a management change coming on and a future business school case study. Honestly, I’d rather be part of the customer club Sonos used to have, which actually felt unique for much more positive reasons.

No good to me as I wont be buying any more sonos kit and I don’t listen to Radio, I like to pick my own music

I'm glad to (finally) see some reflection on the side of Sonos. I hope the company understands that it did not just fail to release a working app, but that the biggest disappointment was in the response of the company. If this message had gone out 2 weeks after the initial release, when to scale of the disaster was clear to everyone, I (and probably others too) would have been much more understanding and earning back trust would have been much easier. It's damn near impossible now.

I expected as few weeks ago that the edit queue functionality would take a long time to be "reintroduced". At least this message gives me some comfort that my lowered expectations of Sonos have been calibrated well.

This sentence has me puzzled a bit on what exactly the commitment to me (or us) is.

Mr. Spence,

Please resign immediately.  Joseph Biden had the wisdom and humility to do so.  You have directly caused and are responsible for a terrible mess.  I have not been able to access my Music Library for two months and counting now.  I have spent countless hours trying to fix the mess you are responsible for having allowed to exist in the first place.

By your actions, you have created an enormous well of ill-will towards Sonos now and in the foreseeable future.

I am sure the Sonos community would love to know how this update ever came to be released.

The argument that the May release was “needed” to enable the headphones that had been promised to investors, is a load of bollocks. I work for a publicly traded company, so I know that it’s dangerous to disappoint investors. However, the debacle of this release has the stock down ~20% YTD, so by comparison the hit might have been smaller if they’d gone to investors in Q2 with tail between legs and saying “Sorry, the headphones are pushed back to Q3”. If this “ground up” software rewrite was going to be needed to enable headphones and/or any other future products, well, first there should have been a moratorium on shiny new product releases (“Squirrel!”) and change for its own sake, whilst they got the software rewritten and stable on the current products. The result of not having done so is that they’ve now got sideways and will never catch up. If they’re always introducing change from new products before fixing the bugs related to previous products (and life in general), stability will be perpetually elusive.

I would be curious on the metrics Sonos studies on repeat buyers of their products or those of us that add on throughout the years. I would say it is pretty large group among the community. I am one of those in the camp where 6 or so years ago, I bought my first pair of Sonos speakers to ‘try them out’ and see how they worked and if I really liked them or satisfied, would add on and continue to add on. I ended up loving them and added on over the years. Now up to 10 speakers throughout my home. Plus my family and friends that I recommended Sonos as well that are now jokingly giving me a hard time about this debacle.

Now, I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. But, isn’t there a relatively basic marketing strategy that it can cost five to seven times more to acquire a new customer versus retaining an existing one? Their success rate selling to us as existing customers has to be quite high. No idea on that % versus selling to or acquiring new customers versus, selling to us the existing base. It just seems you would not want to disrupt your current base of fairly loyal customers in the manner they have since early May. The people that are going to continue buying your products.

Just seems basic business that the application that operates your hardware is not something as a company you would want to so royally f--- up as to brick systems, users unable to even add new products, not even mentioning the removal of basic features that were lost and have been complained about as we have exhausted for months here on the forum. It’s incredible they missed the mark so terribly on this. Now my fear is that internal developers and others are going to just bail on Sonos and who knows if anyone will be able to pick up the pieces.

Imagine coming home from the shop having spent a load of money on a bunch of Sonos kit today, plugging it in and then spending several hours trying to get it to work. Then realising after an internet search or two that actually you had no chance of making it work, because it doesn’t work. I guess the upside is that you could maybe return it to the shop. I on the other hand get to keep my worthless junk, that may or may not work again in the future. Having worked in software development a bit I know mistakes can be made, but to get into this situation with your core application is shocking. I hope they fix things quickly for everyone that has already invested. Going forward the brand is dead once this gets into the mainstream media. 

Why does my system constantly keep working? I have 13 Sonos speakers, and can load up the app and search for and play a track in 4-5 seconds. The volume slider is instantly responsive, I have no intermittence in playback, and all my thumbnails load up every single time, morning, noon and night.
All my favourites, recently played, and playlists are there too, and I have no issues accessing Apple Music or Spotify.
Where’s the letter from Patrick Spence apologising for keeping my music working perfectly? When can I be like everyone else and have difficulties. I’ve tried doing nothing and still my music plays. 
I feel like I’ve been singled out for exceptional functionality, it’s not fair. At this rate, if this carries on, I’ll just keep my speakers and buy some more. 

Still as of today I cannot use my 12 Sonos Speakers in my house!!! Because of your CEOs incompetence. I really don’t care one iota about this * and fake apology. 
 

Get my speakers to work! Or prepared for a class action lawsuit!

*Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.*

Well that contrast is part of what makes the flakiness so maddening and kind of proves the point: the same (or more complex) system works for one person and not for others. Experts here can claim “Those of you having problems aren’t configuring your router properly” or other blame-the-user things like that, and who knows, maybe they’re right (although I doubt it). But we can’t know that, can we, given the seemingly random error message salad that Sonos spews: “Something went wrong. Try again” or “Error 913” or “The song is not encoded correctly” (a particularly annoying error belied by the fact that the song played fine for 3 minutes until 5 seconds ago, and by the way is playing from Sonos Radio, so if it it really were not encoded correctly, YOU PEOPLE misEncoded it, and oh … now it’s playing fine again.) If Sonos were to give useful plain-language error messages such as “Living Room Sonos PLAY:1 has dropped off your wifi network,” or “I see you’re on controller version 14.20; the current version is 80.05.04” then we could diagnose things that might truly be our fault.

That would be ridiculously helpful! Coders must surely have to type in the error messages so why can’t they type the actual issue instead of ‘error 1002’… 

Regarding knowing what’s wrong, on many occasions I’ve tried to give as much info as I can about my functioning setup in the hope that there might be one thing there that some users might think ‘oh, I’ll try setting my mesh to AP mode’ or ‘my router has an MTU of 1492 - I wonder if I should have it on 1500’ - not to be smug but to help offer some relief from the ongoing frustration. My setup works fluidly and without issue so the settings I have across router, mesh, phone and app are clearly congruent with the settings needed for Sonos to work.

But people just cannot be bothered to explore the possibility. They shouldn’t have to, and yes it may well have worked fine before - but it doesn’t work for them now so it feels like spending 30 mins fine tuning settings (I’ve no IT expertise but I can access my router settings) could bring back full Sonos functionality rather than 30 days of shouting at the forum…

Bravo! Superior trolling.

Just FYI to everyone in this post…

If you want your voice to be heard you have to leave your own comments.

Giving a like to someone else’s comment doesn't express the why of your dissatisfaction. To put that in perspective it’s no different than you allowing someone else to vote (on whatever) and you just wait for the results without casting your own vote. The results may not be what you hoped for.

Put another way for you down-home country folks...You can’t win a fishing contest if you don’t bait your hook and put your pole in the water.

As it looks at the time of this writing only 2.61% (162) have responded out of 6188 views.

Before you start...I know those are just raw numbers without any actual data analysis. If someone would like to somehow extrapolate the actual data...then be my guest. 

Thanks. Even the most helpful people need a break every now and again from giving their time selflessly.

Do you not feel a level of guilt selling on your products ?

My conscience would not permit me to sell or even give away something that i do not think lives up to standard.

I guess there is always the defence of diferent users different needs.

Shocking that promised resolutions have been pushed back again.

Upon someone mentioning it i realised not just music library but also playing from mobile is not an option.

As many have suggested they should make 16.2 available until this mess is sorted out.

I managed to download it and have locked it off from updates to keep using this speaker eco system as i intended

Extremely disappointed about the new app. This ‘apology’ is simply too late.

There are customers, who have spend a significant amount on your products. You can't simply say sorry and move on, when these customers cannot use the products they bought.

I must admit that I did not face many issues at the beginning. As a software developer I can relate that bugs occur. But this is another level. Features are suddenly not available anymore, flaky response in the app (system not found etc). But recently I ‘discovered’ several breaking issues when I was trying to help somebody installing his Sonos devices. He can't use his Port, for several months now….

Also, this community forum which seems to be maintained by users gives me the feeling that the company doesn't listen to their customers.

I advise anyone with a personal library having problems with it, to set up a Plex server and add it as service in the Sonos app. You don't have to be particularly tech savvy and there's lots of information out there about how to do it. If you're particular about your tagging like I am, make sure you untick the box that allows Plex to alter it! I set it up after they ditched SMB1 access and it runs flawlessly. I have it running on a Mini-PC and it should be possible set it up on most NAS systems and, obviously, PCs. You can access and playback all of your music (with album artwork!) in the Sonos app and create playlists that won't get lost by Sonos. I finally removed the Sonos access to my library after an update a couple of weeks ago which meant that all tracks from Various Artists albums were listed as individual albums. 

I have all 11 volumes in the Easy Tempo series and all are V/A artist albums. Compare and contrast the search results returned from the Sonos app when searching Easy Tempo in the Sonos search bar on my Android phone which is running the latest app update:

Hello Sonos, Thank you for the update. We appreciate the feedback. Is is possible to post the “fixes” being addressed in each release…..? Again, many thanks.

Fire Spence.

I can’t give this enough thumbs up. I spent a thou on a one and a sub mini last year. Regret it deeply.

Your post seem strange to me, you’re adding to the toxicity.

If I look over the other side of the room my speakers are there.

My system really is there honest.

So when is append to queue happening?