The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.
What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.
As a designer and longtime Sonos customer who was also affected by the terrible new app, a little piece of me died inside each time I read the word “redesign.” It was hard not to take it personally, knowing that my profession could have anything to do with how things turned out. Was it really Design’s fault?
Even after devouring dozens of news articles, social media posts, and company statements, I couldn’t get a clear picture of why the company made the decisions it did. I cast a net on LinkedIn, reaching out to current and former designers who worked at Sonos. This story is based on hours of conversations between several employees and me. They only agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity. I’ve also added context from public reporting.
The shape of the story isn’t much different than what’s been reported publicly. However, the inner mechanics of how those missteps happened are educational. The Sonos tale illustrates the broader challenges that most companies face as they grow and evolve. How do you modernize aging technology without breaking what works? How do public company pressures affect product decisions? And most importantly, how do organizations maintain their core values and user focus as they scale?
Whenever I moved into a new home, I used to always set up the audio system first. Speaker cable had to be routed under the carpet, along the baseboard, or through walls and floors. To get speakers in the right place, cable management was always a challenge, especially with a surround setup. Then Sonos came along and said, “Wires? We don’t need no stinking wires.” (OK, so they didn’t really say that. Their first wireless speaker, the PLAY:5, was launched in late 2009.)
I purchased my first pair of Sonos speakers over ten years ago. I had recently moved into a modest one-bedroom apartment in Venice, and I liked the idea of hearing my music throughout the place. Instead of running cables, setting up the two PLAY:1 speakers was simple. At the time, you had to plug into Ethernet for the setup and keep at least one component hardwired in. But once that was done, adding the other speaker was easy.
The best technology is often invisible. It turns out that making it work this well wasn’t easy. According to their own history page, in its early days, the company made the difficult decision to build a distributed system where speakers could communicate directly with each other, rather than relying on central control. It was a more complex technical path, but one that delivered a far better user experience. The founding team spent months perfecting their mesh networking technology, writing custom Linux drivers, and ensuring their speakers would stay perfectly synced when playing music.
As a new Sonos owner, a concept that was a little challenging to wrap my head around was that the speaker is the player. Instead of casting music from my phone or computer to the speaker, the speaker itself streamed the music from my network-attached storage (NAS, aka a server) or streaming services like Pandora or Spotify.
One of my sources told me about the “beer test” they had at Sonos. If you’re having a house party and run out of beer, you could leave the house without stopping the music. This is a core Sonos value proposition.
The original Sonos technology stack, built carefully and methodically in the early 2000s, had served the company well. Its products always passed the beer test. However, two decades later, the company’s software infrastructure became increasingly difficult to maintain and update. According to one of my sources, who worked extensively on the platform, the codebase had become a “rat’s nest,” making even simple changes hugely challenging.
The tech debt had been accumulating for years. While Sonos continued adding features like Bluetooth playback and expanding its product line, the underlying architecture remained largely unchanged. The breaking point came with the development of the Sonos Ace headphones. This major new product category required significant changes to how the Sonos app handled device control and audio streaming.
Rather than tackle this technical debt incrementally, Sonos chose to completely rewrite its mobile app. This “clean slate” approach was seen as the fastest way to modernize the platform. But as many developers know, complete refactors are notoriously risky. And unlike in its early days, when the company would delay launches to get things right—famously once stopping production lines over a glue issue—this time Sonos seemed determined to push forward regardless of quality concerns.
The rewrite project began around 2022 and would span approximately two years. The team did many things right initially—spending a year and a half conducting rigorous user testing and building functional prototypes using SwiftUI. According to my sources, these prototypes and tests validated their direction—the new design was a clear improvement over the current experience. The problem wasn’t the vision. It was execution.
A wave of new product managers, brought in around this time, were eager to make their mark but lacked deep knowledge of Sonos’s ecosystem. One designer noted it was “the opposite of normal feature creep”—while product designers typically push for more features, in this case they were the ones advocating for focusing on the basics.
As a product designer, this role reversal is particularly telling. Typically in a product org, designers advocate for new features and enhancements, while PMs act as a check on scope creep, ensuring we stay focused on shipping. When this dynamic inverts—when designers become the conservative voice arguing for stability and basic functionality—it’s a major red flag. It’s like architects pleading to fix the foundation while the clients want to add a third story. The fact that Sonos’s designers were raising these alarms, only to be overruled, speaks volumes about the company’s shifting priorities.
The situation became more complicated when the app refactor project, codenamed Passport, was coupled to the hardware launch schedule for the Ace headphones. One of my sources described this coupling of hardware and software releases as “the Achilles heel” of the entire project. With the Ace’s launch date set in stone, the software team faced immovable deadlines for what should have been a more flexible development timeline. This decision and many others, according to another source, were made behind closed doors, with individual contributors being told what to do without room for discussion. This left experienced team members feeling voiceless in crucial technical and product decisions. All that careful research and testing began to unravel as teams rushed to meet the hardware schedule.
This misalignment between product management and design was further complicated by organizational changes in the months leading up to launch. First, Sonos laid off many members of its forward-thinking teams. Then, closer to launch, another round of cuts significantly impacted QA and user research staff. The remaining teams were stretched thin, simultaneously maintaining the existing S2 app while building its replacement. The combination of a growing backlog from years prior and diminished testing resources created a perfect storm.
Measurement myopia can lead to unintended consequences. When Sonos became public in 2018, three metrics the company reported to Wall Street were products registered, Sonos households, and products per household. Requiring customers to register their products is easy enough for a stationary WiFi-connected speaker. But it’s a different issue when it’s a portable one like the Sonos Roam when it’ll be used primarily as a Bluetooth speaker. When my daughter moved into the dorms at UCLA two years ago, I bought her a Roam. But because of Sonos’ quarterly financial reporting and the necessity to tabulate product registrations and new households, her Bluetooth speaker was a paperweight until she came home for Christmas. The speaker required WiFi connectivity and account creation for initial setup, but the university’s network security prevented the required initial WiFi connection.
Perhaps the most egregious example of misplaced priorities, driven by the need to show revenue growth, was Sonos’ investment into content features. Sonos Radio launched in April 2020 as a complimentary service for owners. An HD, ad-free paid tier launched later in the same year. Clearly, the thirst to generate another revenue stream, especially a monthly recurring one, was the impetus behind Sonos Radio. Customers thought of Sonos as a hardware company, not a content one.
At the time of the Sonos Radio HD launch, “Beagle” a user in Sonos’ community forums, wrote (emphasis mine):
I predicted a subscription service in a post a few months back. I think it’s the inevitable outcome of floating the company - they now have to demonstrate ways of increasing revenue streams for their shareholders. In the U.K the U.S ads from the free version seem bizarre and irrelevant.
If Sonos wish to commoditise streaming music that’s their business but I see nothing new or even as good as other available services. What really concerns me is if Sonos were to start “encouraging” (forcing) users to access their streams by removing Tunein etc from the app. I’m not trying to demonise Sonos, heaven knows I own enough of their products but I have a healthy scepticism when companies join an already crowded marketplace with less than stellar offerings. Currently I have a choice between Sonos Radio and Tunein versions of all the stations I wish to use. I’ve tried both and am now going to switch everything to Tunein. Should Sonos choose to “encourage” me to use their service that would be the end of my use of their products. That may sound dramatic and hopefully will prove unnecessary but corporate arm twisting is not for me.
My sources said the company started growing its content team, reflecting the belief that Sonos would become users’ primary way to discover and consume music. However, this strategy ignored a fundamental reality: Sonos would never be able to do Spotify better than Spotify or Apple Music better than Apple.
This split focus had real consequences. As the content team expanded, the small controls team struggled with a significant backlog of UX and tech debt, often diverted to other mandatory projects. For example, one employee mentioned that a common user fear was playing music in the wrong room. I can imagine the grief I’d get from my wife if I accidentally played my emo Death Cab For Cutie while she was listening to her Eckhart Tolle podcast in the other room. Dozens, if not hundreds of paper cuts like this remained unaddressed as resources went to building content discovery features that many users would never use. It’s evident that when buying a speaker, as a user, you want to be able to control it to play your music. It’s much less evident that you want to replace your Spotify with Sonos Radio.
But while old time customers like Beagle didn’t appreciate the addition of Sonos content, it’s not conclusive that it was a complete waste of time and effort. The last mention of Sonos Radio performance was in the Q4 2022 earnings call:
Sonos Radio has become the #1 most listened to service on Sonos, and accounted for nearly 30% of all listening.
The company has said it will break out the revenue from Sonos Radio when it becomes material. It has yet to do so in the four years since its release.
As the launch date approached, concerns about readiness grew. According to my sources, experienced engineers and designers warned that the app wasn’t ready. Basic features were missing or unstable. The new cloud-based architecture was causing latency issues. But with the Ace launch looming and business pressures mounting, these warnings fell on deaf ears.
The aftermath was swift and severe. Like countless other users, I found myself struggling with an app that had suddenly become frustratingly sluggish. Basic features that had worked reliably for years became unpredictable. Speaker groups would randomly disconnect. Simple actions like adjusting volume now had noticeable delays. The UX was confusing. The elegant simplicity that had made Sonos special was gone.
Making matters worse, the company couldn’t simply roll back to the previous version. The new app’s architecture was fundamentally incompatible with the old one, and the cloud services had been updated to support the new system. Sonos was stuck trying to fix issues on the fly while customers grew increasingly frustrated.
Since the PR disaster, the company has steadily improved the app. It even published a public Trello board to keep customers apprised of its progress, though progress seemed to stall at some point, and it has since been retired.
Tom Conrad, cofounder of Pandora and a director on Sonos’s board, became the company’s interim CEO after Patrick Spence was discharged. Conrad addressed these issues head-on in his first letter to employees:
I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell.
Conrad signals that the company has already begun shifting resources back to core functionality, promising to “get back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’s incredible history.” But rebuilding trust with customers will take time.
Since Conrad’s takeover, more top brass from Sonos left the company, including the chief product officer, the chief commercial officer, and the chief marketing officer.
I admit that my original hypothesis in writing this piece was that B2C tech companies are less customer-oriented in their product management decisions than B2B firms. I think about the likes of Meta making product decisions to juice engagement. But in more conversations with PM friends and lurking in r/ProductManagement, that hypothesis is debunked. Sonos just ended making a bunch of poor decisions.
One designer noted that what happened at Sonos isn’t necessarily unique. Incentives, organizational structures, and inertia can all color decision-making at any company. As designers, product managers, and members of product teams, what can we learn from Sonos’s series of unfortunate events?
As a designer, I’m glad I now understand it wasn’t Design’s fault. In fact, the design team at Sonos tried to warn the powers-that-be about the impending disaster.
As a Sonos customer, I’m hopeful that Sonos will recover. I love their products—when they work. The company faces months of hard work to rebuild customer trust. For the broader tech industry, it is a reminder that even well-resourced companies can stumble when they lose sight of their core value proposition in pursuit of new initiatives.
As one of my sources reflected, the magic of Sonos was always in making complex technology invisible—you just wanted to play music, and it worked. Somewhere along the way, that simple truth got lost in the noise.
P.S. I wanted to acknowledge Michael Tsai’s excellent post on his blog about this fiasco. He’s been constantly updating it with new links from across the web. I read all of those sources when writing this post.
I was sitting on a barstool next to my wife in a packed restaurant in Little Italy. We were the lone Kansas City Chiefs supporters in a nest full of hipster Philadelphia Eagles fans. After Jon Batiste finished his fantastic rendition of the national anthem, and the teams took the field for kickoff, I noticed something. The scorebug—the broadcast industry’s term for the lower-third or chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen—was different, and in a good way.
I posted about it seven minutes into the first quarter, saying I appreciated “the minimalistic lower-thirds for this Super Bowl broadcast.” It was indeed refreshing, a break from the over-the-top 3D-animated sparkling. I thought the graphics were clear and utilitarian while being exquisitely-designed. They weren’t distracting from the action. As with any good interface design, this new scorebug kept the focus on the players and the game, not itself. I also thought they were a long-delayed response to Apple’s Friday Night Baseball scorebug.
Anyhow, as a man of good taste, John Gruber also noticed the excellence of the new graphics. Some of his followers, however, did not.
It looks as if they just let an intern knock something up in PowerPoint and didn’t bother having someone check it first. Awful. 👎
The scorebug is absolutely horrible! I really hope they don’t adopt this for the 2025 season, or I will riot. Horrible design and very distracting especially the score, this looks like something out of Fortnite.
Gruber has a wonderful and in-depth write-up about FOX Sports’ new NFL scorebug. Not only does it include a good design critique, but also a history lesson about the scorebug, which surprisingly, didn’t debut until 1994.
Until 1994, the networks would show the score and time remaining when they cut to a commercial break, and then show it again when they came back from commercials.
I had totally forgotten about that.
Better look at the new scorebug displayed during a pre-game broadcast test.
My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched A Complete Unknown last night and The Brutalist a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession.
Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, is up at all hours writing songs. Sometimes he rushes into his apartment, stumbling over furniture, holding onto an idea in his head, hoping it won’t flitter away, and frantically writes it down. Adrien Brody, playing a visionary architect named László Tóth, paces compulsively around the construction site of his latest project, ensuring everything is built to perfection. He even admonishes and tries to fire a young worker who’s just goofing off.
There is an all-consuming something that takes over your thoughts and actions when you’re in the groove willing something to life, whether it’s a song, building, design, or program. I’ve been feeling this way lately with a side project I’ve been working on off-hours—a web application that’s been consuming my thoughts for about a week. A lot of this obsession is a tenacity around solving a problem. For me, it has been fixing bugs in code—using Cursor AI. But in the past, it has been figuring out how to combine two disparate ideas into a succinct logo, or working out a user flow. These ideas come at all hours. Often for me it’s in the shower but sometimes right before going to sleep. Sometimes my brain works on a solution while I sleep, and I wake up with a revelation about a problem that seemed insurmountable the night before. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.
If there’s one criticism I have about how Hollywood depicts creativity, it’s that the messiness doesn’t quite come through. Creative problem-solving is never a straight line. It is always a yarn ball path of twists, turns, small setbacks, and large breakthroughs. It includes exposing your nascent ideas to other people and hearing they’re shitty or brilliant, and going back to the drawing board or forging ahead. It also includes collaboration. Invention—especially in the professional setting—is no longer a solo act of a lone genius; it’s a group of people working on the same problem and each bringing their unique experiences, skills, and perspective.
I felt this visceral pull just weeks ago in Toronto. Standing at a whiteboard with my team of designers, each of us caught up in that same creative obsession—but now amplified by our collective energy. Together, we cracked a problem and planned an ambitious feature, and that’s the real story of creation. Not the solitary genius burning the midnight oil, but a group of passionate people bringing their best to the table, feeding off each other’s energy, and building something none of us could have made alone.
For my mental health, I’ve been purposely avoiding the news since the 2024 presidential election. I mean, I haven’t been trying hard, but I’m certainly no longer the political news junkie I was leading up to November 5. However, I get exposed via two vectors: headlines in the New York Times app on my way to the Wordle and Connections, and on social media, specifically Threads and Bluesky. So, I’m not entirely oblivious.
As I slowly dip my toe into the news cycle, I have been reading and listening to a few long-form pieces. The first is the story of how Hitler destroyed the German democracy legally using the constitution in just 53 days.
Historian Timothy W. Ryback, writing for The Atlantic:
By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections. When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them.
That sets the scene. Rereading the article today, at the start of February, and at the end of Trump’s first two weeks in his second term, I find the similarities striking.
Ryback:
Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists.
Trump won the 2024 election by just 1.5% in the popular vote. It is the “fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Within days of taking office, Trump is already remaking the Justice Department to his liking and installing loyalists.
Hitler appointed Hermann Göring to his cabinet and made him Prussia’s acting state interior minister.
“I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”
Then, later in March, Hitler wiped the slates of his National Socialist supporters clean:
…an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes.
Upon taking office, Trump signed an executive order granting pardons and commutations for the January 6th rioters and murderers.
The similarities are uncanny.
A large part of what made Hitler’s dismantling of the Weimar Republic possible was because of the German Reichstag—their legislature. In a high-turnout election, Hitler’s Nazi party received 44 percent of the vote.
Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.
They took this as a mandate to storm government offices across the country, causing their political opponents to flee.
While Trump and his cronies haven’t exactly dissolved our Congress yet, it has already happened on the Republican side in a radical MAGA makeover.
Many Republican politicians have been primaried to their right and have lost. And now, with the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, on Trump’s side, he has vowed to fund a primary challenge against any Republican who dares defy Trump’s agenda.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Ezra Klein’s columns and podcasts. In a recent episode of his show, he dissects the first few days of the new administration. On the emerging oligarchy:
The thing that has most got me thinking about oligarchy is Elon Musk, who in putting his money and his money is astonishing in its size and his attentional power because he used that money to take control of X. Yes. The means of communication. The means of communication in putting that in service of Trump to a very large degree. And then being at the Trump rallies, he has become clearly the most influential other figure in the Trump administration. The deal has not just been that maybe Trump listens to him a bit on policy, it’s that he becomes a kind of co-ruler.
In his closing for that episode, Klein leaves us with a very pessimistic diagnosis:
in many ways, Donald Trump was saved in his first term by all the people who did not allow him to do things that he otherwise wanted to do, like shoot missiles into Mexico or unleash the National Guard to begin shooting on protesters en masse. Now he is unleashed, and not just to make policy or make foreign policy decisions, but to enrich himself. And understanding a popular vote victory of a point and a half, where you end up with the smallest House majority since the Great Depression, where you lose half of the Senate races in battleground states, and where not a single governor’s mansion changes hands as a kind of victory that is blessed by God for unsparing ambition and greatness, that’s the kind of mismatch between public mood and presidential energy that can, I guess it could create greatness. It seems also like it can create catastrophe.
I, for one, will be hopeful but realistic that America will end up in catastrophe and our fears of democracy dying will come to fruition.
P.S. I didn’t have a good spot to include Ezra Klein’s January 28, 2025 episode, but it’s a very good listen to understand where the larger MAGA movement is headed.
The design blog that connects the dots others miss. Written by Roger Wong.
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