CEO Patrick Spence finally gives users an apology
It’s been a long time coming, but I guess it takes “courage” to say sorry. But that’s exactly what Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has done, 11 weeks after the much-derided updated Sonos app went live.
Rather than the infuriating marketing speak that the Santa Barbara brand used in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous launch – which saw users flood forums with negative feedback and has seen Sonos’ stock price take a pretty dramatic dive – we finally have an admission that users have been let down.
“I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Spence writes in a blog post published on 25 July.
“There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.
“We developed the new app to create a better experience, with the ability to drive more innovation in the future, and with the knowledge that it would get better over time. However, since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.”
Just a day after the launch we published an advisory post, warning people to hold back from updating if they hadn’t already done so, highlighting some of the major issues such as local music library missing features, no queuing options, no alarms and numerous software issues.
Spence didn’t just use the blog post to apologize, he also detailed the update roadmap to – hopefully – get Sonos back to where it once was… and hopefully improved as that was the whole point of the app update in the first place.
He stated that there had been updates rolled out every two weeks since the 7 May app launch, and gave specifics on what updates were coming down the line, on that bi-weekly cadence.
July and August:
- Improving the stability when adding new products
- Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play
August and September:
- Improving Volume responsiveness
- User interface improvements based on customer feedback
- Improving overall system stability and error handling
September:
- Improving Alarm consistency and reliability
September and October:
- Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue
- Improving functionality in settings
He signs off by saying that he knows there’s work to be done to earn back user’s trust but that the team is working hard to do just that.
For me personally, I think it’s obvious that Sonos rolled out the app just so as it could meet the planned launch date for the Sonos Ace headphones.
Which I think was effectively doubling down on a mistake as, not only was the app clearly undercooked, so was the software on the Sonos Ace headphones themselves.
While the sound quality on the Ace headphones is great, and they work well as Bluetooth headphones, the Sonos-specific stuff such as the TV Swap functionality, was buggy as heck at launch (and still isn’t great to be honest.)
Hopefully these continued updates mean improvements on both fronts.
See also: What the hell is going on at Sonos
