Sonos Apologizes for New App Failure

April 23rd was a special day for Sonos: They launched their new app, which aimed to offer a more modern experience and be more in line with the current use of smart speakers. This also coincided with the upcoming presentation Sonos Acehis first headphones. The intentions, while certainly good, backfired and blew up in the company’s face. The app, unfortunately, turned out to be a disaster.

The alarm went off when many of the previous app’s core features were missing from the new one. But as more people updated, the severity of the situation became clearer. Thousands of users were left without access to their Sonos devices, many unable to set them up, in both cases even after disconnecting and reconnecting or performing a factory reset. In addition, some basic operations no longer worked correctly. Most incendiary, turning the volume up or down, or pausing a song, required waiting for a minute or more.

Sonos has decided not to remove the update and revert to the previous version of the app until all of these issues are resolved.. After all, the previous app worked correctly. Instead, they minimized the problem, at least initially. A few weeks later, in what can only be described as frightened flight forwardIn a statement to specialist media, the company said it “took a lot of courage” to launch this new version of the app and that users will therefore have to swallow a bitter pill while they look for solutions.

“The Sonos app redesign was an ambitious initiative that shows how committed we are to reinvention and reinvention. “It takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing that it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.”

The announcement has justifiably angered thousands of Sonos product owners who have had absolutely no problems for years and suddenly found themselves unable to use their speakers.

Two months later, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence issued a public apology acknowledging the mistake and promising to fix it. Is it late? Definitely. Is it necessary? Absolutely.

“There’s not a single employee at Sonos who hasn’t been impacted by letting you down.”

Spence’s statement begins by acknowledging the problems caused by the app. “We know that many of you have experienced significant issues with our new app since it launched on May 7, and I want to begin this message by personally apologizing for the frustration this has caused. There is not a single employee at Sonos who would not feel bad about letting you down, and I assure you that fixing the app issues has been and remains our top priority.”

“We designed the new app to improve the user experience and allow for more innovation in the future, and we are confident that it will improve over time. However, we have encountered several issues since launch. Fixing them has delayed our previous plan to add features and functionality as quickly as possible, especially those that disappeared with the launch of the new app,” he continues.

“We’ve been releasing app updates approximately every two weeks since May 7. “Each one brings significant improvements, adding features and fixing bugs.”

The statement goes on to say that updates released from May 7 to the present have resolved most of the issues that the company’s customers were experiencing. But check out the dedicated forums, and subreddit from Sonos tells a completely different story.

In fact, two of the most bleeding Still not resolved: Adding or reconnecting to existing Sonos systems and turning the volume up or down. Yes, we’ve gotten to the point where the smart speaker is having trouble turning the volume up and down in the app.

In our case, the editorial office has Sonos speakers. Hypertext and personally, I, and several people at home (seven to be exact), continue to have serious problems. Half the time I can’t start playing a song, a simple task. In many cases, increasing or decreasing the volume is a real headache.

Improvements expected to arrive in the coming weeks or months

Sonos says the app will continue to improve throughout July and August, adding and customizing new devices and improving your music library configuration.

Then in August and September, they’ll fix the volume up/down issue. They’ll improve the graphical interface and overall system stability. In September, they’ll fix the instability of alarms — yes, alarms, surreal ones. Finally, in September and October, they’ll re-enable the ability to edit the playback queue. Another of the many basic features that disappeared with the launch of the new app.

So Sonos users will continue to experience problems for the next three months. There is no going back. The company is not interested in re-releasing its previous app, which worked without problems. There are three temporary solutions: Use the legacy Windows or Mac apps. If you use Android, download the version. .apk from the previous app. And if you have an iPhone, buy one of the unofficial apps that work well. In some cases, the new web version of the app works a little better.

There’s no doubt that Sonos is working hard to address the issues caused by the new app.. But it is clear that they had to postpone its launch along with Sonos Aceabout three months and thus have more stable and reliable software. This or simply relaunch the previous app called Sonos S2 and leave the new version as a beta, especially for those of us who use headphones of this brand.