Sonos' app woes could end up being great for customers

The ongoing saga of Sonos' disastrous 2024 app update continues to rumble on, but it looks like the sound experts have come up with a plan to make lemonade from lemons. The firm has a plan to earn back customers' trust and loyalty, and that could be good news for Sonos owners.

Writing on the Sonos website last week, CEO Patrick Spence announced a strategy to not just fix the app but "actively build a better Sonos experience for everyone".

According to Spence, some of the changes are already in progress; the rest will be implemented before the year is out.

So what's changing at Sonos?

Sonos says it's changing its entire approach

The biggest change is also the simplest: Sonos won't launch products until they're ready.

That means establishing "ambitious quality benchmarks at the start of product development" and not shipping products that don't meet them. It sounds basic, but the Sonos app problems are largely because the app wasn't ready to roll but launched anyway.

Sonos figured a launch-first, fix-later strategy would work. It didn't.

Sonos also says it's going to involve more customers and more diverse setups in pre-launch testing in order to identify and address quality issues. And future launches, such as app updates and replacements, will happen gradually "allowing customers to adjust and provide feedback before it becomes the default."

The firm is also extending its warranties by an extra year too, "for all home theatre and plug-in speaker products".

That only applies to products that are still under warranty, so if you have older Sonos kit with expired warranties the extension won't apply. And it won't apply to portable devices such as the Roam 2 and Move 2.

These changes are significant: Sonos is putting its hand up, admitting to having messed up and setting out exactly how it's going to ensure the same problems don't happen again.

Whether that's enough to restore customer confidence remains to be seen, and of course there's a big difference between making promises and actually delivering them. But for the sake of Sonos customers and employees, hopefully this is the beginning of a new and better chapter.