How bad was the botched update Sonos pushed out just ahead of the launch of the Sonos Ace headphones? It’s hurt the company where it matters most — its bottom line
“Thanks to Ace, our long-awaited entry into headphones, we reported year over year revenue growth and delivered results that slightly exceeded our expectations in our third quarter,” CEO Patrick Spence wrote in a note accompanying Sonos’ fiscal third-quarter earnings report. “This was overshadowed by the problems that our customers and partners experienced as a result of the rollout of our new app, which in turn has required us to reduce our Fiscal 2024 guidance.”
Sonos addressed the system update further in its Q3 earnings call, including that two new devices have been delayed.
“We have a clear action plan to address the issues caused by our app as quickly as possible,” Spence continued. “While our app setback is regrettable, it is one chapter in our over twenty years of delighting customers. I speak for everyone at Sonos when I say that our number-one priority is to make this right and ensure that the next chapter is even better than the previous ones.”
The major app update didn’t just break things — it also removed a number of features that customers had depended on, like the ability to edit a queue, or set a sleep timer, or manage music on local networks. Beyond that, Sonos systems also started to become sluggish and unresponsive — a stark contrast for the wireless music system that up until early 2024 had always just worked.
Sonos, for its part, acknowledged the issues fairly quickly, though it did so in forums like Reddit and not in a more conspicuous way. It wasn’t until late July that Spence publicly addressed the major meltdown and apologized to customers. “I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Spence wrote in the July 25 letter. “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.”
