The Sonos app fiasco: how a great audio brand nearly ruined its reputation

Sonos has officially appointed Tom Conrad as CEO, the company announced on Wednesday. Conrad took over as interim chief executive in January following the company’s disastrous app launch in May 2024, which led to the resignation of former CEO Patrick Spence.

Conrad has served on Sonos’ board of directors since 2017 and was also the chief product officer of the short-lived streaming service Quibi. Now, Conrad says he’s ready to start “imagining the next generation of experiences” at Sonos that he discussed in our interview earlier this year.

It’s my final day at The Verge and Vox Media after over 13 years. And as luck should have it, I was able to wrap up my tenure here by interviewing Tom Conrad, the interim CEO of Sonos. I’ve covered this company more extensively than any other, and as our readers know, Sonos has been through the ringer over the last year — in a mess of its own making, to be clear. But over the last several months, Conrad, a Sonos board member since 2017, has kept the company laser-focused on a turnaround effort with frequent app improvements and bug fixes.

With successful stints at Pandora, Snap, and elsewhere, Conrad has deep software roots. (Yes, he was also the chief product officer at Quibi.) So on Friday, I threw my most pressing questions at the man who clearly hopes to become the permanent CEO of Sonos. We covered some of what I know Sonos’ Reddit community is likely curious about and other topics that seemed timely, and I came away encouraged about the company’s odds of getting back on track.

As Sonos continues a company-wide effort to redeem itself after last year’s app snafu, it’s adding a well-known industry name to its board of directors. This morning, Sonos announced that Hugo Barra is joining the board to replace Mike Volpi, who is stepping down after 15 years — the longest tenure of any board member.

Barra has a long resume that includes senior leadership positions at companies including Google, where he’s credited with leading “the Android ecosystem from nascency through its first billion users.” After that, he moved onto Xiaomi and spent three years overseeing global operations for the influential Chinese phone manufacturer. Barra’s next stop was Meta, where he served as vice president of the company’s Oculus virtual reality division.

Sonos chief innovation officer Nick Millington wrote in an update published yesterday that he and his team are “100% focused” on understanding and addressing issues with the Sonos app. It’s the latest in a series of Millington’s posts sharing his team’s progress as it tries to restore features that were left out of the app’s controversial redesign in May last year.

Here’s what Millington, the original Sonos system architect who is tasked with fixing the app, has to say about the effort:

In a continued shuffling of the top ranks at Sonos, chief marketing officer Jordan Saxemard has exited the company. His departure is effective immediately. The news was announced during an internal call on Monday. Lindsay Whitworth, who has been at Sonos for over 20 years, will lead the brand’s marketing on an interim basis.

Internally, employees are happy about Whitworth taking over. She’s a longtime Sonos veteran who understands the company’s culture and customer base, and giving her the marketing reins is another move by interim CEO Tom Conrad to show rank-and-file employees that he’s serious about getting Sonos back on track in 2025.

Not long before last year’s software quagmire thrust the company into controversy, Sonos tinkered with an idea that some employees believed might resonate with Gen Z customers. Engineers at Sonos prototyped a miniature speaker that could magnetically connect to the back of Apple’s recent iPhones.

At least conceptually, the since-abandoned product sounds rather similar to JBL’s Soundboost speaker. Released back in 2016, that MotoMod accessory was designed to attach to Motorola’s Moto Z lineup of smartphones. Any time you placed it on the phone, music and other audio would automatically play through the Soundboost, which offered louder and more powerful sound than a phone’s very small speakers.

Things at Sonos are getting worse before they get better — if they’re going to get better. Today the company laid off approximately 200 employees, The Verge has learned. The news was announced at around 4PM ET, and a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad was posted on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”

Conrad clearly sees a need to rethink the way Sonos operates as part of the company’s turnaround effort. Sonos is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday afternoon. And if this is the precursor to that, the near-term outlook probably isn’t very good.

This week is quickly becoming a sea change moment for Sonos as the company looks to undo the damage done to its reputation since last May. It all began on Monday with the departure of CEO Patrick Spence, who was replaced by board member Tom Conrad. Then came news that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin would also be leaving the company — another indication that Sonos is serious about correcting course and taking accountability for its new app woes.

In a third shakeup within the company’s leadership ranks, I can report that chief commercial officer Deirdre Findlay also plans to leave Sonos in the coming weeks. The company’s corporate governance page says Findlay “oversees all marketing, revenue, and customer experience organizations at Sonos. She is responsible for integrated brand strategy, geographic expansion strategies, and all go to market execution.”

A day after Sonos announced a CEO transition, the company is making more moves. Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin will also be leaving his position. Some employees have told me that Bouvat-Merlin shares a significant amount of blame for the brand damage that Sonos has endured over the last year after deciding to release an overhauled mobile app well before it was ready for customers. There have been reports that top executives at the company ignored warnings from engineers and app testers that the new software wasn’t up to par ahead of its May rollout. Those alarms didn’t stop it from shipping.

In an email to staff, interim CEO Tom Conrad — who himself has plenty of product experience — said the CPO position is now “redundant” and that Bouvat-Merlin’s job is being eliminated. “I know this is a lot of change to absorb in two days and I want to thank you for being resilient,” Conrad wrote.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumored to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring.

Tom Conrad, a longtime veteran of the tech industry who joined Sonos’ board of directors in 2017, has been appointed interim CEO following today’s ouster of Patrick Spence. And in his first letter as the (temporary) new boss, Conrad hits on a number of things that will likely be music to the ears of rank-and-file Sonos employees.

“I’ve heard from many of you about your own frustrations about how far we’ve drifted from our shared ideals,” he says in the letter. “There’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us, including what I’m sure will be some very challenging moments, decisions, and trade-offs, but I’m energized by the passion I see all around me for doing right by our customers and getting back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’ incredible history.”

Sonos will soon encourage employees on its various product teams who live near its US office locations to come in for at least two days per week, The Verge has learned. That’s a notable break from the company’s history, throughout which Sonos has enthusiastically supported fully remote and hybrid work. Job listings at Sonos routinely state that “it’s about impact, not location.” Glassdoor reviews have long backed this up, with employees reporting no pressure to come into the office.

But that lax stance is set to change slightly as Sonos continues its effort to right the ship following this year’s app mishap and stay on track with upcoming products. It’s adopting a stricter policy that will call for product employees within proximity of Santa Barbara, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco to regularly be present at those offices. The Santa Barbara location is where Sonos is headquartered. The company also currently operates international offices in Paris and the Netherlands

Sonos really needed a great product right now.

2024 will be remembered as the year that Sonos nearly torpedoed its brand with the haphazard, premature rollout of an overhauled mobile app. This led to an unprecedented outcry from loyal customers who faced myriad bugs, diminished system performance, and other issues. Many called for CEO Patrick Spence to step down. That didn’t happen, but Sonos has spent the majority of this year on the back foot with apologies, turnaround plans, and assurances that a setback of this magnitude will never happen again.

Sonos is still trying to climb out from the hole it dug itself earlier this year by recklessly shipping an overhauled mobile app well before the software was actually ready. Today, just a couple weeks after the release of its latest hardware products — the Arc Ultra and Sub 4 — Sonos reported its fiscal Q4 2024 earnings. And the damage done by the app debacle is clear.

Revenue was down 8 percent year over year, which Sonos attributed to “softer demand due to challenging market conditions and challenges resulting from our recent app rollout.” During the quarter, the company sank $4 million into unspecified “app recovery investments.” (Sonos previously estimated it could spend up to $30 million to resolve all of the trouble that has stemmed from the rebuilt app.)

Sonos remains in the throes of the biggest controversy in its history — and it’s one of the company’s own making. Now, several months after the May release of its overhauled app badly tarnished the brand’s reputation, CEO Patrick Spence has announced a multipart plan to right the ship.

You can break the strategy down into two main objectives. First, Sonos has taken steps to thoroughly understand just how the hell everything went so wrong — both with its software development practices and its underlying corporate culture — that it somehow wound up in this predicament to begin with. And second, the company is kicking off a broad effort intended to rebuild the trust of its customers and convince them that nothing like this will ever happen again.

Sonos is still trying to clean up from the mess from the messy rollout of its new app, and to help give users a better idea of what fixes are in the pipeline, the company has shared a public Trello board detailing fixes that it’s working on.

“All the cards here are sourced from various posts and release notes communications (Future Feature Update, for example), including communications from [CEO Patrick Spence] directly,” says Reddit user KeithFromSonos, who is a Sonos employee. “What we are hearing and working on is sourced from you — the Community at large and our acknowledgment of that area of opportunity.”

Sonos has released an update to its app as it attempts to reverse the fallout from a disastrous redesign. But while the update adds enhanced accessibility settings and improved stability during the product setup process, the update addresses just a fraction of user complaints.

Sonos is reintroducing the ability to clear your music queue on the Android app — a feature that’s been sorely missed since the app’s relaunch. It also added a Night Mode toggle for sound bars, which enhances dialogue without you having to turn up the volume on your TV.

If you want the old Sonos app back, it’s not coming. In a Reddit AMA response posted Tuesday, Sonos CEO Spence says that he was hopeful “until very recently” that the company could rerelease the app, confirming a report from The Verge that the company was considering doing so. But after testing that option, rereleasing the old app would apparently make things worse, Spence says.

Since the new app was released on May 7th, Spence has issued a formal apology and announced in August that the company would be delaying the launch of two products “until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos.”

Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS — a clear sign of what an ordeal the company’s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design that rolled out in May to a flood of negative feedback. (The new Sonos app currently has a 1.3-star review average on Google Play.)

Letting customers fall back to the older software could ease their frustrations and reduce at least some of the pressure on Sonos to rectify every issue with the new app. At least for now, the redesigned version is all that’s available, which makes it impossible for some customers to avoid its flaws. The situation has gotten substantially better with recent updates and the app has turned a corner for many, but there’s still plenty of work to be done.

Sonos laid off approximately 100 employees this morning, a source familiar with the situation tells The Verge. The cuts spanned across the company and impacted divisions including marketing, product and engineering, platform and infrastructure, and software quality. I’m told those affected abruptly lost access to the company’s internal network. Sonos is also in the process of winding down some of its customer support offices, including one in Amsterdam that will close later this year.

Sonos confirmed the layoffs to The Verge on Wednesday afternoon, providing a statement from CEO Patrick Spence. “We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6 percent of the company,” Spence said. “This action was a difficult, but necessary, measure to ensure continued, meaningful investment in Sonos’ product roadmap while setting Sonos up for long term success.”

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said the new Ace headphones got off to a strong start and helped spur “year over year revenue growth” that slightly exceeded the company’s expectations as part of its third quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon. But that success was immediately “overshadowed” by ongoing woes with the redesigned Sonos app.

The company is now delaying two hardware releases originally planned for later this year as it deploys an all-hands-on-deck approach to fixing the app. “I will not rest until we’re in a position where we’ve addressed the issues and have customers raving about Sonos again,” Spence said during the afternoon earnings call.

The big Sonos app redesign was intended to make the company’s software more modern, customizable, and easier to use. But two months after its May release, it’s hard to look at this situation as anything but a colossal unforced error. Sonos has been steadily adding back missing features and functionality with frequent app updates, but the chorus of customer frustration isn’t going away.

To that end, CEO Patrick Spence today published a letter that covers the progress Sonos has made with the new app — and what customers can expect in the near future. It also contains Sonos’ first direct apology for the rough patch that “too many” users have gone through. Some customers have been waiting for that after the company’s initial responses (like saying the app overhaul took “courage”) came across as tone-deaf, given all the bugs and technical difficulties.

A week after introducing a redesigned, sleeker app that omitted many core features, Sonos held an Ask Me Anything event on its forums today. The purpose was partly to make it clear that customer frustrations are being heard. But as has been the case since last week, the feedback skewed overwhelmingly negative. This company’s community remains pretty damn angry over losing software capabilities like local music search, sleep timers, and more with no warning.

Many participants asked Sonos why it released an app that was nowhere near on par with the previous version in terms of functionality — even after, as The Verge has learned, private beta testers raised concerns with the state that the software was in before launch. And they were often less than satisfied with the answers given by Sonos’ product team.