5 Ways Sonos Can Fix The Mess

Forbes

14-05-2025

(Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe my loyalty is misguided. But I still love my Sonos system, despite the last 12 months being an absolute dumpster fire for the multi-room audio specialist.
Between a patent grudge match with Google, a revamped app that broke more than it fixed, and a sneaky privacy-policy edit that quietly dropped 'we won't sell your data' from the US rules, Sonos users have been pretty livid and pretty vocal.
Well, the ones on the Sonos forums and subreddits have been, at least.
However, Sonos isn't blind to all this; it's well aware it messed up big time; hence a new interim CEO being put in place, cancelled products, and regular updates to improve the Sonos experience.
There's still a way to go though - one year on from the disastrous app rollout - so here are five moves Sonos must make to win back our trust and steady the ship.
We're still suffering through the aftermath of last year's new Sonos app. As the new interim CEO Tom Conrad admitted in a recent interview with The Verge, if the Sonos board had known how bad the performance bugs were, 'we never would have shipped it'.
That doesn't really help us users though, who've had to endure months of constant crashes, missing features and flaky connectivity. Sonos has spent a year 'righting the ship' according to Conrad, who claims dramatic progress has been made in the last few months especially.
And yes, those improvements have been noticed. My system seems more stable than it has been in months and the regular updates have added a bunch of missing features back into the mix.
But we're still not even at a level that we were with the 'old' app 12 months ago. So those improvements need to continue at pace. Our multi-room speakers worked perfectly for years… we just want them to work perfectly again.
(Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Sonos, apparently, just canceled its 'Pinewood' streaming-TV box and, if the rumors surrounding it were true, that's a good thing. No one wanted a $400 streaming box powered by an ad-tech company.
The good news is that Conrad knows this, he's clearly focused on launching gear that's much more in line with what made Sonos great in the first place.
There is speculation on the tech rumor mill that both an Era 100 follow-up and dedicated AV receiver are on the roadmap, and the company has just announced Hugo Barra is joining the board, which can only mean good things from an ecosystem point of view.
The Sonos and Ikea partnership, which brought us some weird and wonderful Symfonisk speakers over the past few years, is officially coming to an end.
That's a real shame because it represented a cheaper ticket to the Sonos party.
Sonos should pick up that torch though. It recently brought the price of the Era 100 down from $249 to $199 to hit a 'magic spot,' but a sub- $100 speaker would be a surefire way of getting more people invested in the Sonos ecosystem.
Within hours of the revamped app going live in May last year the Sonos community was up in arms. Initially though, Sonos stuck to its guns over the new app, towing the company line that it was in the users' best interests in the long run, and a Sonos chief product officer even stated it took 'courage' to launch the new app.
Two weeks after launch the then CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, told The Verge: 'Everybody at Sonos has been testing it for months. It has delivered - we know from data and from feedback - that it is easier to navigate.'
It was a communication tactic from Sonos that spectacularly backfired - and not even a public apology in July was enough to calm the Sonos community down.
However, the past few months have seen a huge improvement on clarity and communication from Sonos, in particular on the Community Forum and the Sonos subreddit, where Keith Nieves, Social Media Program Lead for Sonos, has been putting out fires right, left and center. He even set up a public Trello board so Sonos users could keep track of app improvement plans and progress.
Keith has regularly updated Sonos users during Office Hour sessions on Reddit, and Tom Conrad will actually be joining him for the next one, giving users the chance to speak directly to the new boss.
Conrad also did the rounds of the major tech press publications recently to provide an update of what he's been doing in his first 100 days as the Sonos top-dog.
It's this sort of transparency, and owning past (and indeed future) mistakes, that will help to get the Sonos community back onside.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
The Sonos Ace headphones deserved better. By almost any measure they're excellent hardware – great battery life, strong ANC and transparency modes – but they got buried in the app PR nightmare.
Conrad has stated that software missteps have hurt Ace sales, but he's not given up on the company's first headphones, stating that 'there's a lot we can do with software experiences to further differentiate Ace from other things in the market.'
The Sonos Ace headphones have great potential but, as Conrad alluded to, Sonos needs to do more to set them apart from similarly-priced rivals.
And obviously they also need to fix the app issues that held them back.