Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence said the new Ace headphones are off to a good start and will help spur “year-over-year revenue growth” that was slightly above expectations in the company’s third-quarter earnings report Wednesday afternoon. But that success was immediately “overshadowed” by ongoing issues with the redesigned Sonos app.
The company has now delayed two hardware releases originally planned for later this year as it deploys an all-out approach to fix the app. “I’m not going to rest until we fix the issues and get customers raving about Sonos again,” Spencer said during an afternoon earnings call.
“We believe our focus needs to be on solving the application issues first,” he continued. “This means delaying two major new products we plan to launch in the fourth quarter until our app experiences reach the level of quality we, our customers and partners have come to expect from Sonos.” One of the two products is almost It’s definitely Sonos’ next flagship soundbar, codenamed Lasso, which I revealed last month . “These products are ready to ship in the fourth quarter,” Spence said in response to phone questions.
He also dives into app issues and how Sonos plans to address them. Spencer remains convinced that overhauling the app and its underlying infrastructure is “the right thing to do” for the future of the company; he said the new app “has a modular development platform based on modern programming languages that will Allowing us to drive more innovation faster.”
But Spence now admits the plan was rushed. “With this app, my pursuit of speed backfired,” he said. “As we rolled out new software to more and more users, it became clear that there were stubborn bugs that we hadn’t caught in our testing. As a result, too many of our customers were left with a worse experience than before.
Last month, Spence apologized for the bugs, missing features, inconsistent system performance and other issues customers have experienced since the redesigned app was first launched in May. Just this morning, a temporary outage in the cloud caused problems on some systems. Sonos promises to update its app every two weeks in an effort to regain its customers’ trust. The app is in better shape now than it was two months ago, but some features like queue management won’t be restored until the fall.
Now, Sonos is turning to some longtime experts for help. “I’ve asked Nick Millington, the original software architect of the Sonos experience, to do whatever it takes to fix the issues with our new app,” Spence said. Sonos board member Tom Conrad is helping oversee app improvements and “making sure” everything stays on track.
It sounds like Sonos customers will also be able to take advantage of some promotional offers in the coming weeks. “We will be developing a number of programs this quarter to support and thank our customers and partners for sticking with us during this time and to turn their dissatisfaction into joy,” Spencer said. These programs will continue at least Six months until Season 4 and Season 1 in 2025.
