Sonos' $30M app fail is cautionary tale against rushing unnecessary updates

Not sure which update this is about, but just a couple months ago my app updated with a big redesign and they forgot the alarms feature! [0] I wasn't able to turn off my alarm for a couple of weeks until they reimplemented it.

https://en.community.sonos.com/speakers-229128/alarms-didn-t...

Oh my goodness; the new Sonos app is so unequivocally bad compared to the previous design.

Literally everything I do with our speakers is more difficult now, especially anything that involves searching for music or radio stations.

The new app also removed the ability to "easily" synchronize volumes across a group of speakers by moving the volume slider to zero then to the desired volume.

I honestly don't know what the product team for the app was thinking. It's as if they forewent customer testing in favor of pulling a Steve Jobs.

Why couldn't they restore the old app in the meantime?

The interesting question is: What will Sonos change to make sure that such a desaster will not happen again? Besides some software engineering challanges I see a big failure in the approach to user experience design. It looks like hardly any real user was involved, but that is key to UX design.

> ....until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos.

We'd rather expect you to test before releasing a terrible app. Did you not talk to anyone outside of the chain of 'do as I say, I know best'.

Oof. Companies have gained the ability to push updates over the air to hardware a customer bought 5 years ago. Sounds great, now you can get bug fixes and new features, right? ... Or, you know, they can push a "redesign" that introduces tons of bugs and eliminates useful features! Existing customers are now plugged in to corporate dysfunction more than ever before!