For several months now, Sonos has been feeling the anger of customers over its controversial app update: what was intended to deliver an improved user experience meant that for some users, they could no longer use their favorite features. It didn't help that the firm's response to those customers wasn't exactly emollient: the firm praised its own "courage" rather than saying "oops. We messed up."
That's now changed, with Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologizing to customers for the first time in a newly published letter. And more importantly, he's promising an aggressive program of updates to fix all the issues and hopefully restore customers' trust.
Sonos: we're sorry and we're going to fix it
"I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you," Spence writes. "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."
As he explains, since May there have been app updates roughly every two weeks. Going forward Sonos will commit to a bi-weekly update schedule that will run through October, with the following improvements and fixes.
Sonos updates in July and August 2024
- Improving the stability when adding new products
- Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play
Sonos updates in August and September 2024
- Improving Volume responsiveness
- User interface improvements based on customer feedback
- Improving overall system stability and error handling
Sonos updates in September 2024
- Improving Alarm consistency and reliability
Sonos updates in September and October 2024
- Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue
- Improving functionality in settings
Signing off, Spence writes: "We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and are working hard to do just that." He also says he's open to feedback, which you can email to him at ceo@sonos.com.
Some people didn't have problems with the new app, but it really turned some people against the best Sonos speakers that they'd invested in, due to the missing features, unreliable operation, or both.
Sonos status as ranking highly among the best wireless speakers relies in no small part on its app making the products as easy to use as possible. Here's hoping the new app will finally live up to that promise by the end of the year.
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