So I tried to set my kitchen alarm this morning, the one that plays NPR at 6:45 so I don't have to actually process human speech before coffee, and the Sonos app still doesn't have alarms working right. Not "gone," exactly. Just wrong. It fires, then it doesn't remember the volume I set, then it plays from a completely different speaker group than the one I picked. This has been going on since May. It's the end of June now. I'm still annoyed, and I don't think that's an overreaction.
Quick recap for anyone who managed to avoid this: Sonos shipped a total rebuild of its mobile app back on May 7th, and it launched missing a pile of stuff that used to just work. Queue management was broken. Local music library browsing was gone or badly hobbled. Alarms were flaky. Accessibility support for screen readers, which some blind and low-vision users depended on daily, straight up regressed, VoiceOver users were describing an app that had gotten worse, not better, which is about as bad a look as a hardware company can get. Sleep timers vanished for a while. People who'd spent real money on multi-room setups were suddenly stuck with speakers that couldn't do basic speaker things.
I've had a pair of Sonos Ones in the kitchen and a Beam under the TV since around 2019, I want to say I paid something like $400 total for the three of them over a couple purchases, and for five years the app was just furniture. You didn't think about it. That's the whole point of a good appliance. Now I think about it constantly, mostly while swearing at my phone.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence did at least go on the record and admit the launch was a mess, which I'll give him credit for, plenty of companies would've just let support forums absorb the rage silently. He's said a bunch of the missing functionality is coming back over the summer, and to be fair some of it has trickled in already. But "trickled in" is doing a lot of work in that sentence when the thing replaced an app that already did all of this on day one, four years ago. You don't get points for restoring features you removed. That's not a roadmap, that's a repair job.
What actually bugs me isn't even the bugs. Software has bugs, fine, whatever. It's that this was a completely unforced error. Nobody was demanding a from-scratch app rewrite of a product that already worked. I'd bet real money the redesign was driven by something internal, a new hardware push, a subscription tier, some roadmap slide about modernizing the platform, and the actual customers holding actual speakers in their actual kitchens were an afterthought. That's the part that's hard to forgive. Not the failure, the priorities behind it.
Small tangent, because it's been that kind of week for tech generally: Nvidia spent the last several trading days doing its own version of "worked fine, then suddenly didn't," losing something on the order of half a trillion dollars in market value in a single session before clawing some of it back. Half a trillion dollars evaporating and reappearing over a few days while my $130 smart speaker can't remember to play the news at the right volume is a genuinely funny juxtaposition to me. Different scales, same underlying lesson maybe, big or small, complicated systems that used to just work are having a rough month, and the people who depend on them are stuck waiting it out.
I don't think Sonos is going to lose me as a customer. I'm too many speakers deep, and the hardware itself is still good, the Beam still makes dialogue in movies actually audible, which is the entire reason I bought it. But I've stopped recommending the ecosystem to friends who ask, which I used to do constantly. That's the real cost of a screwup like this. Not the churn, the word of mouth quietly drying up.
Anyway. If anyone from Sonos is reading a random blog in 2024 for some reason: bring back the old queue view. I don't need it reimagined. I needed it to work.