Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s app redesign

I doubt it will be much fun to read Sonos CEO Patrick Spence’s article customer emails over these last few weeks. Since the company launched a revamped mobile app that was rebuilt from the ground up to allow for greater customization and better performance, the Sonos forums and especially its subreddit were in convulsions. The new software was shipped without several features that were present in the previous version. Basic functions like timers and alarms were nowhere to be found. And local music search/playback was a mess – an affront to some of the company’s longtime customers.

Immediately afterwards, Sonos insisted and the company’s chief product officer said it took “courage” to introduce a completely new user experience. That answer… didn’t exactly go over well either. Overall, the redesign has its defenders. Whether you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between completely depends on your individual use case and how you typically use your Sonos system. Some people just play music on their speakers with AirPlay or Spotify Connect and don’t notice this whole fiasco.

But it’s easy to understand why many say their trust in Sonos was shaken after they suddenly lost access to features without warning just by clicking the “update” button. Instead of doing a public beta preview or temporarily offering the new app side-by-side with the old one, Sonos pushed it all at once. (The Ace headphones and Roam 2 speaker would not work with the previous app.)

I heard from private beta testers who told me they did their best to let the company know that this app wasn’t exactly ready for prime time. I’m also sure that Sonos customer support requests have skyrocketed since the redesign, so this is proving to be a rough patch on many levels. Inexcusably, the new app was also a downgrade in terms of accessibility, something the company has I worked quickly to resolve.

Last week, I spoke briefly with Spence about the new Sonos Ace headphones. Predictably, he’s very excited about them and thinks the headphones will be on par with the Sonos brand in terms of sound quality, comfort, and the excellent TV Audio Swap feature.

But obviously I had to address the app situation. Spence has no regrets about Sonos taking the leap when it did, and says the company’s internal data shows that the benefits of the new app are very real and are being felt by (less vocal) customers.

Here is that part of our discussion:

Patrick Spence: There are two things that customers have been emailing me and giving me feedback about for years. One is the headphones, but the other is the app. I would say probably the entire time I’ve been at Sonos, but since I’ve been CEO, I’ve heard customers say, “You need the app to be easier and more modern to navigate. It needs to have a faster response and lower latency”, and all these things. I’ve been using it since Christmas. Everyone at Sonos has been testing it for months. It has made – we know from the data and the feedback – that it’s easier to navigate. But it’s a change for customers. It’s faster and more responsive and offers a better overall experience.

But of course there is a period when people need to adapt to this change, and we are going through that period. We have the most passionate customers in the world. This architecture and everything we’ve done around it allows us to move forward a little faster. We basically take a monolith and break it down into modular parts, which allows us to move faster on certain elements. Things like the alarm issue were a bug, right? So we could more quickly than in the past address. And we’ll find other bugs as we go through this. We are keeping our heads down and making sure these issues are addressed.

What I wish we had done was probably communicate the script a little more clearly.

Chris Welch: Better message saying, “These features will be missing at launch.”

PS: Exactly. And “that’s when they come.” Because we already had a plan for how to get through this. But the “why now” was because it’s actually a lot easier to navigate, more responsive, and just a better overall experience, and that’s what happens to the 99 percent of customers you’ll never hear from as you go through this. .

But we have to remember that we have the most passionate customers in the world. Once you add a feature to a platform – this is important to keep remembering as we move forward – once you add it, it can become the most important thing to a person and the thing that matters most to that person. Just making sure that we have a plan and that we’re communicating well about it, I think, is important. And we will get better as we get through this.

Just yesterday, Sonos released another update to the new app with some bug fixes focused on accessibility, local music playback, and more. And yours providing a timeline for other improvements in progress. The company no doubt hopes that within six months this will all be a distant memory, the new app will have achieved feature parity (and then some) with the software it replaced, and all will be forgiven among its loyal customer base.

But for now, much of the community is still on edge as Sonos approaches the major launch of its Ace headphones and enters a huge new product category that could spur growth amid declining demand for high-end -speakers and soundbars.