Sonos workers shed light on why the app update went so horribly

In May, Sonos updated its mobile app—to the dismay of many users. With missing features and bugs, customers complained about a loss of functionality and hardware not working the way it should. As Sonos deals with the expensive repercussions, a report from Bloomberg today highlights how Sonos allowed the release of an update so buggy and incomplete as to overturn its goodwill with long-standing customers.

Illustrating how poorly this app update has gone, last month, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said the company would spend $20 million to $30 million in the short term to get the app where it needs to be (which is, basically, functioning as well as the predecessor) and rebuild customer and partner trust. Sonos also expects to miss its annual revenue target by $200 million. This is partially due to its delay of two hardware releases to focus on the app. Bloomberg noted that “Sonos shares are down 25% this year.” Annual bonuses and merit-based raises have also reportedly been canceled.

Outdated code

One reason for the app’s failure is the outdated code and infrastructure that the prior app was running on. Anonymous employees Bloomberg spoke with claimed that the Sonos app’s technical debt had been building up for 20 years before the update.

By the time Sonos decided to update the app in mid-2022, it was dealing with software based on virtually obsolete infrastructure and code languages. As such, the app update “was less about introducing new functionality than sorting out the existing mess,” Bloomberg reported.

After decades of the app’s inner workings growing stale, the impending release of Sonos’ long anticipated Ace wireless headphones, which came out in June, made the need for a new app both urgent and necessary. This is because the headphones were made to be on-the-go, differing from Sonos’ other products, mainly speakers and soundbars relying on home Wi-Fi. This seems to align with comments that Spence made to investors in August. He said that the app update was “a redesign of the entire system—not only the app but also the player side of our system, as well as our cloud infrastructure—and this was a complex undertaking.”

In May, Bloomberg reported that Sonos aimed to release the new app “at least a few weeks” before Ace. At the time, Bloomberg said that the update was originally supposed to release in March but was delayed due to “software-engineering challenges.”

Although it makes sense that Sonos’ most mobile offering yet would need a more advanced, revamped app, it seems that the app’s redesign could have been initiated earlier than the mid-2022 timeframe that Bloomberg reported. In addition to the years of technical debt that has been said to be built up, Sonos’ headphones have been reported to be in development since at least 2019.