I love Sonos gear, from the Sonos Era 300 speaker and its stellar Spatial Audio, the Sonos Arc and its all-encompassing TV sound, and the most recently released Sonos Ace headphones that get very close to being the best noise-canceling headphones around.
What I'm not such a fan of is the current state of the app — to the point that I haven't used it with my Sonos gear since it dropped all my devices and forgot my Tidal password. Since then Sonos has tried to make the app more useable, but loads of damage has been done — and now there are some physical victims.
Hope you weren't looking forward to seeing the rumored Sonos set-top box any time soon, because Mark Gurman reports that it's been delayed so that Sonos can focus on making sure that its app work.
Sonos' app woes continue afresh
Sonos has had a weird rollercoaster of a 2024. Its app redesign has gone down like a lead balloon, but then there were the excellent Sonos Ace headphones that launched.
Unfortunately, and potentially thanks to the app, those haven't been as successful sales-wise as the firm hoped, and users are becoming ever more irate with the app. To support the new headphones, Sonos redesigned its app and turned it into a mess.
The rollout was unexpected and removed key features, like alarms and timers, and generally made the app slow to connect to existing speakers, to the irritation of long-term users who have invested in the company's ecosystem of connected audio products.
So that they can fix the app, Sonos is pouring all of its resources into a solution. As yet it doesn't seem to have found one, with issues remaining even months after its initial release. Given that its stock is now reportedly down 32% this year, we could be looking at a real-time fall of an audio giant — which would be a massive shame.
Sonos has a lot of work to do to earn back the trust of its users, both old and new alike — and the only way it can do that is to fix the thing that they're going to be using to make their gear work. Because who wants to buy something new if the software that runs it doesn't work?
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