Update: I first published this op-ed back in June, when Sonos was really coming under fire. I’ve revisited it in late October to update with all the latest goings on with the multi-room audio specialist. And plenty of goings on there have been. Read on to get right up to speed with the current Sonos state of play.
They say that bad things come in threes, and the PR team over at Sonos HQ will be praying that rings true.
The last thing the multi-room audio giant needs right now is another round of negative press, after a trifecta of bad news events that haven’t just hit the Santa Barbara’s value, but have also rocked the confidence of what was, until the last few months at least, a very loyal and content user base.
The start of Sonos’ woes began in October of last year when US District Judge William Alsup threw out the company’s $32.5 million lawsuit verdict win against Google, stating that two of its key patents were unenforceable and invalid.
By the end of that month, we saw the Sonos share price hit $9.89, less than half of what it was just 6 months prior, and less than a quarter of its 2021 all time high of over $43.
As reported by Reuters at the time, Sonos were judged to have improperly tried to connect its patents for multi-room audio technology to a 2006 application to claim that its inventions predated Google’s devices.
“This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new,” Judge Alsup said. “This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first.”
A Sonos spokesperson said the ruling was “wrong on both the facts and law” and that the company would appeal.
However, in April this year, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the US trade tribunal’s decision that Google’s redesigns of products were sufficient to avoid infringing Sonos’ multi-room wireless audio patents.
The next – and possibly more damaging when it comes to user reputation – kick-in-the-balls for the Sonos brand came when the all-new Sonos app update landed in May.
Every tech editor and his dog did opinion pieces on this, so I won’t dive too deeply into the details here, but the long and short is that Sonos launched a brand new app, ahead of the launch of the Sonos Ace headphones, that went down like a shit-sandwich with the user base.
The new app was/is buggy as heck and is, albeit with Sonos constantly updating the app and adding stuff back in, missing a bunch of much-used features.
The Sonos Community forum and the Sonos SubReddit were awash with comments and posts explaining how and why the new app is such a disaster.
Now, tech users do like to complain about anything new and there was always going to be some grumbles with a completely new platform going live, but the negative fallout was vast and, in my opinion, completely justified.
It’s clear that Sonos rushed out the new app so as it was in place in time for the Sonos Ace to launch a month later. Sonos seemingly did not want to delay its long awaited debut headphones, especially as many of the details were already doing the circuit of the tech rumor mill.
Reports in the past few months highlight that disgruntled Sonos engineers raised concerns that were ignored.
Initially, Sonos stuck to its guns over the new app, keeping to the company line that it was all in the users’ best interests in the long run.
Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin told The Verge: “Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention. It takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.”
CEO Patrick Spence also spoke The Verge, a couple of weeks after the launch, and stated: “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 is faster and more responsive, and it’s a better overall experience.”
However, he also admitted: “What I wish we would’ve done is probably communicate the roadmap a little more clearly.”
I’m not sure that holds up though. Would the community be more accepting of the new app if they’d have been told that key features, features they’ve used for years such as searching personal music libraries and queuing songs, would be withheld initially but eventually added back in?
As I say, I’m not so sure.
In July, a couple of months after the disastrous roll out, Sonos finally made a public apology.
It had been a long time coming, but I guess it takes “courage” to say sorry. But that’s exactly what Sonos CEO Patrick Spence did, 11 weeks after the much-derided updated Sonos app went live.
“I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Spence wrote in a blog post published on 25 July.
“There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.”
Spence also used the apology to highlight that updates had rolled out every two weeks since the 7 May app launch, and gave specifics on what updates were coming down the line, on that bi-weekly cadence.
And, to give Sonos some credit, it has stuck to that promise. The app is now much more stable and, when Sonos launched the Arc Ultra in October, it claimed that 90% of the missing features were back in place.
The Arc Ultra launch was interesting because Sonos had publicly admitted to delaying hardware launches to focus on sorting the app issue.
“Our focus needs to be addressing the app ahead of everything else,” Spence told investors during an earnings call in August. “This means delaying the two major new product releases we had planned for Q4 until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers and our partners expect from Sonos.”
The Arc Ultra launch, alongside a new Sonos Sub, therefore indicate that the Sonos boss thinks the app is at back at an acceptable level.
A quick look at the Sonos community forum suggests that some users don’t agree though.
What the community is definitely not accepting of is the final part of the bad-news-trio that has plagued Sonos in recent months… the reworded privacy policy.
Consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, over on his YouTube show, highlighted that Sonos has made a change to its privacy policy in the US, with the removal a key line. The updated policy has removed a sentence that said, “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers.”
This caused absolute pandemonium within the user base. At least, the user base individuals who like to post their feelings online.
Sonos has been quick to respond to these concerns, stating that the sentence was removed because it was overly broad and could have been viewed as untrue depending on individual state privacy laws.
“Sonos uses several modern and industry-standard marketing tools, including third party service providers and social media platforms, to help us identify and display relevant ads and marketing communications,” spokesperson Julia Fasano told The Verge. “Any data that is shared in this process is hashed or otherwise pseudonymized, ensuring that our customers personal information remains protected and private and Sonos does not sell personal data.”
In what is, potentially, one of the most exciting years in Sonos’ history – with launches in new categories including headphones and set top boxes – the brand would have hoped to be riding on a wave of positive press, rather than putting out fires left, right and centre.
That was very much the case with the seven point plan that was announced to fix things, which was announced a few weeks back.
Add to all of this that reviews of the Sonos Ace headphones have been a mixed bag too, which in itself is unusual for Sonos; usually it launches a new product and gets top marks across the board.
Sonos is a brand that, for years, has thrived on a reputation of high-end products that “just work.”
That sort of reputation, in tech, can evaporate in an instant and it’s clear Sonos is well aware of that. The communication from the brand is very much focused on getting existing users back on side.
Whether too much damage has already been done remains to be seen though.
