A disastrous redesign of Sonos' mobile app that led to customer complaints, hurt sales and delayed two key product launches can't be fixed by resurrecting the speaker and headphone company's old app, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence he said on Tuesday (August 20).
Since its release in May, customers have complained that the updated app wouldn't recognize existing Sonos speakers and wouldn't allow setting up new speakers or headphones. Earlier this month, Spence said the company was lowering its fourth-quarter sales forecast and delaying the launch of two major new products while it focused on fixing the app.
Spence, who made the comments about the old app, which he refers to as “S2,” in an AMA discussion on Reddit after being asked if the company would make it available for download to customers again, said that returning to it it could actually make things worse.
“The trick of course is that Sonos isn't just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud,” Spence wrote on Reddit. “In the months since the new mobile app came out, we've updated the software running on our speakers and in the cloud to the point that today the S2 is less reliable and less stable then [sic] what you remember After extensive testing, we hesitantly concluded that re-releasing the S2 would make the problems worse, not better. I'm sure this is frustrating. It was disappointing for me.”
Sonos announced it was cutting 6 percent of its global workforce — representing about 110 people — last week after a recent quarterly earnings call in which executives revealed they would spend $20 million to $30 million to fix the app. , investing in customer support and taking other initiatives to win back disappointed buyers.
