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.

There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.

While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.

I kind of expected it: a lot more ink was spilled on Liquid Glass—particularly on social media. In case you don’t remember, Liquid Glass is the new UI for all of Apple’s platforms. It was announced Monday at WWDC 2025, their annual developers conference.

The criticism is primarily around legibility and accessibility. Secondary reasons include aesthetics and power usage to animate all the bubbles.

This week, Google debuted their Gemini 3 AI model to great fanfare and reviews. Specs-wise, it tops the benchmarks. This horserace has seen Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI trade leads each time a new model is released, so I’m not really surprised there. The interesting bit for us designers isn’t the model itself, but the upgraded Gemini app that can create user interfaces on the fly. Say hello to generative UI.

I will admit that I’ve been skeptical of the notion of generative user interfaces. I was imagining an app for work, like a design app, that would rearrange itself depending on the task at hand. In other words, it’s dynamic and contextual. Adobe has tried a proto-version of this with the contextual task bar. Theoretically, it surfaces up the most pertinent three or four actions based on your current task. But I find that it just gets in the way.

When Interfaces Keep Moving

Others have been less skeptical. More than 18 months ago, NN/g published an article speculating about genUI and how it might manifest in the future. They define it as:

A generative UI (genUI) is a user interface that is dynamically generated in real time by artificial intelligence to provide an experience customized to fit the user’s needs and context. So it’s a custom UI for that user at that point in time. Similar to how LLMs answer your question: tailored for you and specific to when that you asked the original question.

According to recently unsealed court documents, Meta discontinued its internal studies on Facebook’s impact after discovering direct evidence that its platforms were detrimental to users’ mental health.

Jeff Horwitz reporting for Reuters:

In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing.

As more and more evidence comes to light about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s failings and possibly criminal behavior, we as tech workers and specifically designers making technology that billions of people use, have to do better. While my previous essay written after the assassination of Charlie Kirk was an indictment on the algorithm, I’ve come across a couple of pieces recently that bring the responsibility closer to UX’s doorstep.

I rewatched the 1982 film TRON for the umpteenth time the other night with my wife. I have always credited this movie as the spark that got me interested in computers. Mind you, I was nine years old when this film came out. I was so excited after watching the movie that I got my father to buy us a home computer—the mighty Atari 400 (note sarcasm). I remember an educational game that came on cassette called “States & Capitals” that taught me, well, the states and their capitals. It also introduced me to BASIC, and after watching TRON, I wanted to write programs!

Nearly three weeks after it was introduced at Figma Config 2025, I finally got access to Figma Make. It is in beta and Figma made sure we all know. So I will say upfront that it’s a bit unfair to do an official review. However, many of the tools in my AI prompt-to-code shootout article are also in beta. 

Since this review is fairly visual, I made a video as well that summarizes the points in this article pretty well.