My Thoughts On The Sonos App Situation

Don't leave me hangin' like the Sonos app

This week’s post will be Short n’ Sweet 😉. I don’t typically respond to news headlines in the form of an article but this one was too loud to ignore.

As I mentioned in my Sonos Ace review, the Sonos app has been having a rough time for the better part of this year and it seems as though the company still can’t find its way back to reliability.

The Problem At Hand

But more than anything, this highlights one of the bigger technical issues living in the modern era: putting all your eggs in one basket. Not to say I never did this either, I did: most of my hardware remains in the Apple ecosystem.

The issue with that sort of setup is that when it works, it’s great! But when one component—in this case, software—falls apart, everything starts to fall apart. I’ve mentioned it before, but I own the Sonos Arc with a Sub Gen 3, and a pair of Sonos Era 300s all paired together. It works great. It sits in my living room and is my main way of enjoying entertainment. And the only reason I’ve enjoyed it so much is through software features such as TruePlay and the built-in software EQ. If either of those features stop working one day, I would be a very upset Sonos user.

I think the main difference for me is that I don’t use the Sonos app all that often. When watching TV or movies, the Arc is controlled by my Apple TV. When I play music, the entire system is controlled by Roon via the Roon Remote application. It controls playback and volume directly through its app.

Now, if I were playing music via Spotify or, more specifically, Apple Music, I could understand how annoying this could be. I’ve opened the Sonos app pretty regularly in the past week or so. Music playback aside, the app is just so darn slow and unreliable. More than half of the time I open the app and it’s just a blank app, indicating that it’s loading something. Often times it takes upwards of 15-30 seconds before anything loads. The kicker? The in-app ad for Sonos’ products load almost immediately every time.

To add even more fuel to the fire, there were portions of the app, after everything’s loaded that simply did not load and threw up error messages. "Unable to load content." How is this acceptable for a sound system that heavily relies on software to run? Even without TruePlay and EQ, I’m sure Sonos’ system is running some sort of DSP to tune the speakers to its house sound.

But I think the most insulting thing about this whole thing is that the old app worked fine. For the most part, there were no issues. Things worked as reliably as you could expect. The app loaded up reliably quickly and content within the app loaded just as fast. Things were easy to find and navigation was easy.

Today, none of that is true. Sure, change can be great. Oftentimes, it’s for the better. And I’m sure in an alternative timeline, it is. But when everything else surrounding the redesign is also crumbling, it’s hard not to blame the redesign for the app’s shortcomings. This is especially frustrating when the redesigned app also stripped away features.

Sonos has a long way to go to regain the trust of its users, and I don’t blame anyone who got rid of their Sonos products because of the redesign. The app went from rock solid and intuitive, to very unreliable and frustrating to use.

All we can hope is for is for Sonos and other brands learn from this massive mistake. Don’t rush updates and by extension—products that rely on the update—out the door. Users are willing to wait for more reliable software and hardware.