Sonos has put out some of the best wireless speakers and best soundbars of recent years, from the Sonos Arc to the Sonos Roam 2, often topping our buying guides and offering an example of what quality audio hardware can be.
So it’s a shame that, for much of 2024, Sonos has been fighting hard to appease an increasingly irritated user base, after a catastrophic app redesign that divided customers and led the company to delay multiple product releases while it got its house in order. But what really happened to make the mighty manufacturer stumble?
The first few months of the year were relatively quiet, as we waited for news of Sonos’ 2024 product lineup and enjoyed expanded voice control functionality when playing Spotify on a Sonos speaker.
That all changed on May 7, when Sonos released a new smartphone app for setting up and controlling Sonos devices on iOS and Android. The app underwent a huge overhaul, after years of “extensive user research”, aiming to streamline the app’s interface and make it simpler to navigate – while also bringing Sonos’ software up to speed with modern requirements.
The app was certainly streamlined, and reworked to centralise important features, such as adding an always-on ‘now playing’ bar; we’ll never complain about an app throwing in dark mode, either. However, it was possibly too streamlined, lacking several key features that Sonos users had relied on. It was like removing the passenger seat from your car to reduce its overall weight.
Some found overnight that sleep timers and alarms were no longer active or available in the app, while others took issue with a sudden inability to edit your song queue in the app – something I couldn’t believe was absent at launch. The new app lacked compatibility with screen-reading tech for the visually impaired, too.
The new app was intended as a hard reset that laid the foundations for Sonos functionality in the years ahead, with other features and niceties added later in the pipeline. But for users to update an app in good conscience and find they lose functionality rather than gain it – especially regarding accessibility – is a hard pill to swallow. It certainly didn’t help that users couldn’t undo the update and go back to the S2 version of the app, even if it had its own problems.
As our contributor Carrie Marshall aptly put it, in the aftermath of the app’s launch, “Fixing missing features in an app is relatively straightforward, but rebuilding those customers’ trust may be a lot harder.” It’s no surprise that many users started opting for a third-party alternative called SonoPhone.
Appageddon
Cue the predictable non-apology tour, as Sonos attempted to assuage users’ concerns while also keeping a brave face on for its public image. But it emerged that the app relaunch was just the most visible symptom of broader problems within Sonos, which was struggling with an accelerating product roadmap alongside a host of layoffs and office closures, as well as a long-delayed iceberg of out-of-date code.
There was no going back to the previous app – despite some brief speculation – and Sonos plowed ahead with a series of post-update updates in the following months, adding in sleep timers, a mute button, numerical values for volume sliders, expanded screen reader support, ‘add to queue’ and ‘play next’ functions, and other similar improvements to appease its users and plug the most glaring gaps. (Work is ongoing.)
Sonos’ woes weren’t limited to its app relaunch, either. We also saw the launch of the company’s first-ever headphones – the Sonos Ace – which was sadly overshadowed by the previous few months of bad press.
Giving it 4 out of 5 stars, we praised the Ace’s Hi-Res audio support, Dolby Atmos movie performance, and ability to sync up with the Sonos Arc soundbar – while acknowledging that its music playback and noise cancellation, two of the most important functions of ANC headphones, fell behind much of the competition.
All in all, these headphones felt incredible for watching TV at home and expanding an existing Sonos Arc setup, but far less impressive when it came to other everyday uses, or as a part of the broader Sonos ecosystem – especially since they can’t yet connect to Sonos speakers other than the Arc.
Somewhere between this cool critical response and public anger over its app fiasco, the Ace headphones got overlooked. According to Bloomberg, Sonos expected to sell 2,500 units per day and ended up hitting only 10% of that target. In September, Sonos’ stock price was also down by a third compared to this time last year.
Course correction
The same report says that Sonos had to delay its product roadmap while focusing on app fixes, which could easily overshadow any new models shoved out the door. For one, it looks like Sonos’ long-awaited set-top-box – said to feature a third-party OS, which would be smart given public hostility to Sonos’ in-house software right now – has been pushed to March 2025.
It’s not all bad, of course. Delaying hardware while you get your house in order is the best thing for customers and the company, ensuring that new models work as intended and don’t release before both hardware and software are ready to go.
And Sonos did manage to turn things around with the release of its (long rumored and much leaked) Sonos Arc Ultra, an update to the beloved Arc soundbar and one of the best single-unit soundbars now on the market.
In our review, we said that “The Sonos Arc Ultra is the new flagship in Sonos’ soundbar line-up, and it takes everything that was good about the original Arc and cranks it up to the next level. Better Dolby Atmos effects, better bass, better speech clarity, better connectivity.” A new speech enhancement feature is a great addition, as is the new Bluetooth button on the rear of the Arc Ultra – small, smart changes that make the 9.1.4 soundbar easier and more enjoyable to use.
While the Arc Ultra sticks to just a single HDMI eARC port and lacks DTS:X surround sound support, it’s still an astonishing reminder of how good Sonos can be at its best, especially after a painful year of watching the company flounder. Here’s hoping the next few Sonos speakers and headphones manage to remind us of that too.