My Google Home costs $30 second hand, don’t sound as good, but I’ve not spent a single cent on it after setting it up. What is SONOS doing?
I think that's the kicker. It was revolutionary when it came out, and it's a solid technical solution, but Sonos was novel over a decade ago.
I'm sure that at some point, Samsung or Google or Sony or some upstart will catch up, but it will be a long time before someone eliminates SONOS from contention despite this multi-year setback
It just did’t evolve very far or very fast, or even adapt pricing to better fit a rapidly changing market.
They switched away from a focus on multi-room hi-fi (or at least mid-fi) audio and users with their own hoard of digital audio to focus more on streaming services and chase the trend of little monophonic speakers. The higher-end devices remained good but became ever more niche.
Then they broke everything, particularly customer trust, with the app update.
[0] I have no idea what it is actually
So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"