How Sonos Stumbled: 2024’s Biggest UX Disaster
Imagine spending thousands on premium home audio equipment only to find the app controlling it rendered your speakers useless overnight. This was the reality for Sonos customers in 2024, when a highly anticipated app redesign led to one of the most disastrous UX rollouts in recent memory.
Cuz I’m free… free fallin’
I’m a huge music fan. Music is almost always playing—whether I’m driving, hiking with headphones, or listening at home. About 10 years ago, I started buying Sonos products to upgrade my home audio experience. Their speakers quickly became my go-to for music and home theater, thanks to their impressive build and sound quality. Over the years, I accumulated several speakers, setting them up throughout my home and even gifting them to others.
Like most IoT devices, Sonos speakers rely on a proprietary app for setup and control. I’ve never been fond of the Sonos app—it was consistently buggy, laggy, and full of annoying usability issues—but once you learned its quirks, it met users’ basic needs: playing & controlling music, pairing speakers, connecting music services, managing playlists, etc.
From Rollout to Fallout
On May 7, 2024, Sonos released a highly anticipated overhaul of its mobile app. The redesign aimed to address years of technical debt and modernize the user experience. Instead, it removed essential features, introduced a confusing interface, and left many customers with non-functional speaker systems. The backlash was swift: over 30,000 customer complaints lit up forums, app reviews, and social media.
You know I'm bad, I'm bad (bad, bad)
Unfortunately, according to Sonos employees, reverting to the previous version wasn’t an option. As Sonos CEO Patrick Spence explained, “This wasn’t just a redesign of the app—it was a redesign of the entire system, including our cloud infrastructure.”
By July, Spence issued a public apology, pledging $20–$30 million to address the issues:
"We know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app… I want to personally apologize for disappointing you. Fixing the app has been, and continues to be, our number one priority."
The UX of it All
Sonos has since lost tens of millions of dollars—not including incalculable damage to its brand reputation. While demand for its hardware products remains steady, its Q4 fiscal results revealed an 8% year-over-year revenue drop.
This failure was preventable. Sonos focused so heavily on deadlines, technical debt, and hardware rollouts that it ignored the “third leg of the stool”: Design. A rigorous research phase—engaging with customers, testing assumptions, reviewing app analytics, and validating user needs through prototypes—could have identified these critical gaps early.
Testing with prototypes could have highlighted issues like missing features and confusing navigation before any code was even written. An incremental rollout with beta users could have flagged bugs and functionality concerns before they reached the general population.
From a risk and financial standpoint, skipping design makes zero sense. The annual cost of a competent software design team to support an enterprise mobile app is less than 1% of the financial losses Sonos has incurred in just over six months.
Lessons for Product Teams
The Sonos app debacle is a masterclass in what not to do. Stakeholders, skipping design and research, pushed deadlines and assumed they knew what users wanted which proved to be a costly mistake. For product teams, the takeaway is clear: UX is a strategic investment, not a luxury. Companies that fail to prioritize design risk not just their products, but their brand, trust, and financial stability.
