I've never owned any Sonos products but I read about this debacle last year. As I understand it, Sonos' new app made major UX changes and bricked many older products. They apologized Their PR unit responded with formulaic damage-control and the obligatory vague corporate promise to do better in the future.
Your understanding may be conflating a few events (others have touched on this). Sonos had technical debt in their system - they were supporting speakers that were 10+ years old, alongside recent ones, all controlled by the same app. Imagine how modern software runs (or doesn't) on a 10+ year old computer. The older systems were holding them back from adding new features that they wanted (like putting Dolby Atmos in sound bars), because the "firmware" that runs on the speakers would exceed the capacities the 10+ year old speakers were built with (not enough ram/storage, not fast enough processors for new software).
So, their first pass at addressing this, years ago, was to offer a trade-in program to try to get those older speakers out of the ecosystem - substantial deals (e.g. 30% discount on new speakers) in turn for getting rid of the old ones. Only, since they don't have retail stores, their "solution" was to
brick the old speaker and have you take it to a recycling center. As you can imagine, a whole lot of people thought the idea of intentionally turning a speaker that was playing music well five minutes ago into e-waste, for no good practical reason (only an economic one) did not sit well with very many people.
So, they relented, and agreed to fork their software - the old/existing software (the "Sonos Controller" app you could download and the firmware it would in turn download to the speakers) became "Sonos S1" (and would continue to work with all the old speakers, but not the new ones they were going to release), and they released a new "Sonos S2" app, which dropped support for the oldest speakers, but in turn added support to the more modern speakers (i.e. the ones made more recently, that had better storage/ram/cpu), as well as new/upcoming speakers they were releasing, along with new features (like Dolby Atmos). This was a bit inelegant, but meant all the older speakers could still keep playing music until the hardware physically gives out, using the S1 app (which would only get security patches going forward), while people with less-old speakers and new speakers could switch to the S2 app and get new features.
But they were still left with considerable technical debt in the app and the firmware, and things needed a rewrite. And, Sonos was pushing into new product areas - they wanted to make headphones, and the S2 app wouldn't work for that. They spent a long time behind the scenes working on a new revision of the software, that would support all the speakers that the S2 system supported, but also let them do things like headphones.
Good plan.
Absolutely terrible execution. They seemingly had some sort of deadline to hit for releasing the headphones (I still stand by my guess that some exec wanted to get his "shipped on time" bonus), and they foisted the rewritten version of the app on all their existing customers when it was only
halfway written (missing tons of features that people depended on) and only
halfway debugged (I'm sure it ran on their testing setup in the lab, but it was totally broken on a whole lot of different home networks and combinations of speakers out in the real world).
Oh, also, the app was a disaster from a UI/UX standpoint - like some drunk executives took turns throwing darts at a dartboard to decide what UI elements to use where - it had drawers that pull out of pulldowns that pull out of drawers accessed by hamburger menus, along with various bits of clickable text that gave no indication that those elements were, you know,
buttons. Like someone had taken a bag of UI ideas and thrown them in a blender. It was needlessly hard to navigate, there was no grand vision to it, and intuition could not help you figure out how to navigate it. And common operations that used to be one or two clicks were now an obstacle course of multiple clicks and menus. And all this added complexity was there at the same time as it was missing a bunch of features people had come to depend on. There were also major performance issues, like hitting volume up/down in the app would take many seconds for speakers
in the same room as you to respond, where before this was instantaneous. Everything in the app was slow. And it seemed like a large part of the reason for this was that they were running commands from your house out offsite to a Sonos-owned server, and doing
something, and then sending the commands back to the speaker - this is not something that anybody had ever asked for ("but what if I want to adjust the volume of music playing at home while I'm at work?"), and has led to security concerns (why are they sending that data out) that I don't think have been resolved to this day.
It didn't really permanently
brick anyone's speakers (to my knowledge), but for many their speakers were left somewhat unusable, or only partially functional - for months on end and I think there were a fair number of people where this meant their systems were as good as bricked until Sonos rectified things ("well, sure, your speakers use to play music just fine, but that was in May, and now it's June/JulyAugust/September - I'm sure we'll get your speakers to play again one of these days"). Imagine if Apple had released an iOS update that rendered, say, a quarter of all iPhones no longer able to make phone calls, and then just left things that way for months on end.
Any sane company would have apologized profusely, immediately reverted to the previous version of the software, and continued to work on the new version of the software behind the scenes until it was fully fleshed out (so all the previous features were properly supported) and fully debugged (so it worked 100% on all the actual installations that were out in the field, that had worked fine on the previous version), oh, and clean up the absolute mess that was the new UI.
That's not what Sonos did. Instead, they gaslighted their customers for months, insisting that only a tiny fraction of a percent of their customers were affected in some minor ways, with a very "who are you going to believe? me, or your own lying eyes?" sort of attitude. Corporate damage control of the PR-only variety. There was a considerable rebellion among users, their community forums got slammed, their subreddit got slammed (with, of course, a handful of apologists with unaffected systems saying "works for me, your problem must be a skill issue" - lots of fun flame wars there), there were lots of damning articles written, lots of home audio/theater installers stopped recommending/carrying/using Sonos gear for "whole home audio" and home theater systems (both because they were directly affected and because they were getting angry calls from people they had sold systems to),
lots of bad press, and their stock price tanked (sure hope that "shipped on time" bonus was worth it), and they ended up having to lay off a whole bunch of employees and delay the release of other new products (oh, but the CEO who signed off on all this got his golden parachute on the way out - that's part of what this article is about).
After many months of this, they came out with a very corporate-y PR apology (that did not apologize for all the gaslighting they had done) and a promise to work to improve the situation. This led to a checklist of things they were going to add/improve/fix in the app/firmware, along with regular updates to the app, and a timetable. These updates are still ongoing at this point, though the pace has slowed considerably (there was an initial period of a few months where they cleaned up some of the most egregious problems, now they're chasing smaller problems). The app's UI has improved, but unfortunately using the awful drunken-dartboard UI the new app debuted with as a starting point (rather than scrapping it and making an actually
good UI). The app/firmware is
still not feature complete compared to where it was a couple years ago. (The thing that annoys me the most personally is, with the old app you could tell the system to play from an arbitrary streaming URL stored in a favorite - I've used this for various password-protected subscriber-only music streams - the new version of the app
still cannot do this, even though I can do it with a 3rd-party Sonos controller app talking to my Sonos speakers - Sonos just hasn't bothered to reimplement that in their new app.)
Since I trust that most of you aren't bots, I want to hear from the Sonos users - did Sonos right their wrongs? Did any of you abandon them for good?
No, they have not completely righted their wrongs. It's a work in progress. I don't know if they'll ever actually complete the process, or just decide at some point that they are done (while desired features are still missing, like the "stream arbitrary URL" feature cited above).
I haven't abandoned them, because I'm one of the lucky ones whose system didn't break. My Sonos system (Arc soundbar, Sub, two older Play:1 surrounds) largely serves as a home theater system (driven by an LG TV connected to an Apple TV and PS5) - it still sounds terrific - and, secondarily, gets used for playing music. I control the music primarily using
Sonos Voice Control (e.g. "Hey Sonos, play At Fillmore East by the Allman Brothers"), and sometimes by playing music from my Apple TV (Apple Music or several other streaming apps). I would use the Sonos app for controlling music more, if it wasn't so screwed up.
I'm still annoyed at how Sonos handled this, and at the current state of the app, and at the "Sonos apologists", who didn't have problems with their particular systems, so they insisted that anyone else having problems must be making it up or must be doing something wrong.
Previously, Sonos was one of the "good" companies, that made slick, high quality, upscale, innovative, tech gear married to tightly integrated software, that all "Just Works" together (sound familiar?). And then they completely trashed their reputation by screwing over their customers while focused on getting that quarterly bonus at any cost. It's going to take a long time to recover from that.
)
