
When the Music Stopped: Inside the Sonos App Disaster
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.









