Sonos lays off 100 employees as its app crisis continues | Hacker News Reader

Sonos lays off 100 employees as its app crisis continues

theverge.com

12 pointssolardev6 comments

Sonos sound systems are fantastic and ushered in some awesome technology that we didn't have when they really started to get off the ground in around 2013. I have had the full home theatre from them for around 5 years now and it sounds excellent. You could go from playing music in one part of the house, playing TV on the home theater, to playing music from Spotify across the entire house all through one app.

The problem, is that their app lets them down. It was on the front foot when it was first released because it combined TV audio, with 100s of other streaming services linked together in the one app. But it has now become slow and difficult.

Sonos hardware is excellent and the features are still excellent, it's just the execution of those features in the app which have become degraded.

To add on to that, the new app is so bad that I still can't connect my subwoofer to the system after the update (worked fine previously). My surrounds randomly disconnect and lose registration (whatever that means). The button to fix it in the app doesn't respond (as in nothing happens when you click on it, like they forgot to implement that action altogether). Streaming services randomly break with no error messages. Devices go out of sync and randomly stop playing through the day. Plus features that used to be there are still missing. The UI changes are a mess too, with sliding drawers that can't be closed, many screens that don't do anything, error flows that change depending on how many times you've retried the same thing, etc.

On top of it all, they removed all async support and you can only call them for help, with several hour wait times and usually no resolution.

They just don't care about software UX. Or their users. Part of the problem is that they only sell hardware at a one time price, so they have no incentive to make it keep working afterward. It's the same model that commodity PC makers have, where they have no way to recoup further support and maintenance costs via an app store.

Sucks. Now I know to not buy expensive hardware with mandatory cloud functions.

As a Sonos customer who's invested maybe $2000-$3000 into their products (nice-ish smart home speakers), I'm really sad to see what's happened to this company over the last year or two.

After a brief COVID-driven boom, they laid off 130 people last year, and again just a few days ago. A lot of this was because the CEO rushed out a huge rewrite of the app (which controls everything – the speakers cannot be used without it), which led to widespread failures and system errors, even months later. It went from a functional (if plain) system to a completely broken one, basically overnight. The CEO publicly apologized, but problems continue (https://www.sonos.com/en-us/blog/update-on-the-sonos-app).

Their stock is down nearly 40% since 6 mos ago (https://www.google.com/search?q=Sonos+stock&ie=UTF-8). Their app reviews went from 4 stars to 1 star in less than a month (https://www.appbrain.com/app/sonos/com.sonos.acr2). On the forums, there's calls for the CEO to step down, along with multiple threats of class-action lawsuits. People have been begging for a rollback to the old app, only to be continuously denied by the company. Finally, they are considering it (https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-rel...).

This is a company that has made the same tragic error before, trying to discontinue software support for older devices – and that wasn't even that long ago (2020: https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-will-make-two-separate-son...), to a huge customer backlash.

I've never seen a company self-destruct quite this badly (even Google usually has the courtesy of providing refunds or migration paths when they graveyard something).

Their CEO, Patrick Spence, was formerly of RIM/Blackberry, another company that went the way of the dustbin. Wonder if a Sonos bankruptcy is on the horizon too...

As a user, I hope they get bought out, leadership gets replaced, and they install someone with a stronger customer focus.

As a customer, I won't make that mistake again (of buying expensive cloud-only hardware products from an unreliable company). (Expensive) lesson learned, I guess :(

It is always wild to see the ways in a business that could have been sustainable for decades can suddenly implode because they get far to ambitious.

Alas there is the Japanese saying "A thousand years of good will can be ruined in a single hour". Even if they change the CEO, it will take years of good moves and good will to regain what they have lost so quickly.

Exactly :( The sad thing is, I don't even know what they were trying to be ambitious about. It's not like they were launching some risky new product segment, or changing their brand in some major way... it was just a boring infrastructure update for their app. It launched with fewer features, less support, and a million bugs – but it didn't have to.

Done right, customers never even needed to know about it. It could've just been a gradual phased rollout, with beta users (which they already have) first, then 2%, then 15%, etc., while the old software continued to work. Or they could've switched endpoints one product line at a time. Or they could've simply allowed the old and new apps to coexist in the app store for a few months to make sure all the kinks were worked out.

It's not like this is world-changing stuff. It's just a software update, the kind that we all do every day.

Worst case, even if they absolutely HAD to launch like this, they should've listened to customers and reversed course (rolling back to the old app) after the backlash.

It's just unfathomable hubris, combining a rushed rollout with unreasonable stubbornness in turning it back. That's the sort of process failure that falls squarely on leadership, not the employees.

It's really not suddenly. They keep making the same mistakes. This is the second or third time the app has changed and they've got it wrong. I have to use two apps to control my Sonos equipment because one of my old units is too old even though it works and sounds great.

They tried to not support old stuff, they tried to make the hardware not work if sold, and they have messed up the app several times.

I want to love them, but it's hard to when you investment could just stop working at any moment.

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