The Sonos App fiasco - Product lessons 6 months on.

Key points:

• Knowing when to launch a new app is a pretty fundamental product function: don’t go backwards.
• Though its wasn’t just that the new Sonos app very much went backwards. It was how Sonos managed its community of fiercely loyal customers.
• Even now, Sonos has a long way to go.
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I’ve done a few teardowns of app disasters - such as the MKBHD wallpaper app - though nothing comes close to a software update that literally took away control of the volume.

Nor one where this wasn’t immediately fixed!

I love my Sonos system and so I have skin and experience in this teardown.

As Sonos users, we’d already gone through the company’s decision to split their controller software across two apps: one for old Sonos equipment and one for new.

But the new Sonos app was on a whole new level.

Conclusion: If your product strategy is to hold your users hostage, you might want a new strategy.
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What happened at Sonos with their new app?

If, like me, you’re a lover of Sonos, you’ll probably know every detail of this story.

If you don’t have Sonos at home - though you follow tech - you’re probably also across at least the gist of what has been happening at Sonos over the past six months.

And of course, if you haven’t heard of Sonos, well, here we are.

Sonos - a cult brand for many Sonos owners - make an ecosystem of excellent, wireless speakers you can put all around your house, controlled by the all-important Sonos app.

And in April 2024 with the imminent launch of their new Sonos Ace headphones, Sonos launched their entirely new  and much anticipated app.

It was a disaster.

It should never have shipped, despite Sonos citing the ‘courage’ showed by launching it.
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A half-baked app missing many of the core functions.

In fairness, my use of the Sonos app has always been pretty simple.

I put the music on in the kitchen and living room at night, pour a glass of wine and start cooking.

Though so many users use the app for so much more.

And the new Sonos app - mandatory to use at launch I might add - was missing so many of the core functions users had been using for years.

Sure, the old Sonos app wasn’t amazing, and with any new app launch, some customers will always hate it no matter what. It’s just a truism of UX that no matter how objectively you improve things, haters are going to hate.

And to give credit where credit is due, I think the UI of the new app is way cleaner and better (here's mine):

Though there was a significant cohort of users that used the sleep-timer and alarm functions and the new app didn’t ship with that: as one example.

• Functions such as playlist, queue and library management were gone.
• Search (!) was missing or incredibly hard to find and when my father-in-law (a Sonos lover) mentioned that fact to me, I knew there was a problem.
• The app wasn’t accessible, sidelining users who were visually impaired or otherwise.
• You couldn’t update your Wi-Fi details in the new app!
• Hardware couldn’t be found by the app. A pretty important omission.
• Playlists disappeared.
• And the ability to change the volume of the speakers was initially unavailable. I kid you not.
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Many asked why such a premium brand would release such an incomplete product on such a loyal community.

Possibly because Sonos saw their new headphones as ushering in a new and significant cohort of customers without the legacy of older Sonos setups and app usage.

Cynical if true.

Reddit was flooded with furious users, though I’ll come to an interesting point on that later:

The Product lessons we can learn.

It’s taken me a while to write this article.

I was going to write it shortly after the app launch, though so much kept unfolding and so I kept watching and waiting.

Positively, Sonos finally got their act together and engaged with their community.

And in fairness, have taken the community on the journey after initially failing to even acknowledge the issues.

Sonos even shared a public Trello board to keep users abreast of their priority of app improvement. Masterstroke. ✔️

Lesson #1 - Don’t rush

Time-to-market is critical in many things Product and digital, though not when you have an enormous and highly engaged audience of daily users.

That isn’t a time to rush, even if you are launching new headphones.

It is clear that the new Sonos app was not rigorously tested, nor had met a sufficient number of users and stakeholders that would have told Sonos to stop rushing!

Lesson #2 - Don’t deprecate essential functions

It is product (and business) criminality to deprecate what are known to be essential features as part of an update.

Using the alarm function as an example:

• In the first release of the new Sonos app , the alarm functionality was removed, albeit that existing alarms remained in place and unconfigurable.
• This post on Reddit tells you all you need to know: Low_Outside_2570 has four alarms they can’t turn off.
• Worse, with an app update, they were able to add an additional alarm, though now couldn't turn that off either!

• Or the queue feature, something our friends and family use when they come over to our house. You know, the ability to add music to the queue, something I have been able to do with my first Sonos system since 2013.
• Something especially critical when you're dancing in the kitchen with your kids.

Sonos described their new app as ‘ambitious’ and I guess that is a word to describe it.

Another word would be “nuts”.

Your MVP doesn’t have to ship with features users aren’t utilising.

But Sonos app wasn’t anything like an MVP. It was at its maturity stage and replacing it absolutely meant replacing it feature-for-feature.

Whereas Sonos launched a MVP, they should have launched what is known as MDP (or Minimum DELIGHTFUL Product).

At an absolute minimum!

Lesson #3 - Allow users to downgrade

Here was the first text from my father-in-law on the topic:

It wasn’t his last.

Running two apps or features concurrently can be technically painful, though it comes with upside:

• You avoid the situation Sonos found itself in.
• Enthusiastic users will engage with the newer (beta) app and you’ll garner great insight and feedback.

You can then announce the cutover to all users and turn off older versions.

With Sonos, everyone was in on the ride whether they wanted on or not. And I’ve made the point that many of these users were rusted-ons like my father-in-law: users who have been trained on Sonos for 15 years and can’t handle changes in tech or worse, tech that doesn’t work or no longer exists.

Long story short, Sonos wouldn’t or couldn’t allow users to use the previous version of the app.

Plenty of users said Sonos could (with all sorts of technical solutions for how to do it), though Sonos never enabled the old app.

Ooff.
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Lesson #4 - Quickly acknowledge the situation

The new Sonos app came out in late April 2024.

It took the CEO weeks to acknowledge the issues but even then, he stood by the new Sonos app.

Talk about being gaslit.

It was only in late July 2024 that the company admitted that the new app and their strategy had been a complete mistake.

By now, users were livid.

As someone that had recently spent $2,500 on a new Arc soundbar and a mini-sub for our living room TV, I was one of them.

The features available to my new products (not withstanding the older Sonos kit around the house) had significantly recessed.

Even in acknowledging the situation, Sonos shed far too little light onto the situation and how things would improve. Small, broad lists of improvements were announced when users knew the lists were just too short.

This was a product fiasco and were all across it.

I worked on a large media subscriptions platform a few years ago and I learned pretty quickly that getting editorial into the socials when anything went wrong- to talk and apologise off the bat - was the best strategy to mitigate churn and a wildfire of anger.

That Sonos didn’t realise this for months was a total product and PR blindspot.
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Lesson 5 - KeithFromSonos (Keith Nieves)

A reason I’m glad I held off writing on the Sonos app debacle, was KeithFromSonos.

And here is Lesson 5. Get yourself a KeithFromSonos.

No doubt, Sonos threw everything at improving its app, though I genuinely cannot understate the fact that this was and remains a very steep hill for them to clime.

At the time, a friend told me about the r/Sonos subreddit with 261k really angry users and I thought, brace for impact.

And sure, the anger was there, though too was a Sonos employee Keith that everyone loved.

Keith was super active in r/Sonos and really helpful and transparent.

Users loved Keith so much that when Sonos announced a round of layoffs, users reached out to ask if Keith was among them:

Lesson #5 has to make you smile right? 😊

He wasn't let off. (Good).

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