Frustration vs Sonos
Dear Sonos users and Sonos employees,
I’m the (very happy) owner of what I believe is a fairly substantial Sonos setup: an Arc Ultra, two Era 300s and two Sub Gen 4s. I genuinely enjoy the hardware and the overall Sonos ecosystem, which is probably why the current state of the app is so frustrating to me.
I’ve been following this group for a long time, and there is one question I keep coming back to:
Why does improving the Sonos app seem to be such a difficult and slow process?
I’m not talking about asking for dozens of completely new features. There are many relatively simple things that users have been asking for repeatedly — improvements to navigation, usability, responsiveness, organisation of settings and overall UX. These requests appear again and again in discussions, often with very similar feedback from completely different users.
What I find particularly interesting is that we are now seeing more and more third-party apps trying to improve the Sonos experience. Some of them manage to provide interfaces and workflows that many users find more intuitive than the official app.
That raises a genuine question for me: is there a technical reason why some of these improvements are difficult to implement in the official Sonos app, or is it primarily a question of priorities and development resources?
I realise that developing and maintaining an application used by millions of people is much more complicated than it may look from the outside. There are probably technical constraints, legacy decisions, compatibility issues and many other things that users simply don’t see.
But that’s exactly why I would love to hear a more detailed explanation from Sonos.
We live in a time when there is no shortage of talented software engineers and UX designers, and there are countless examples of excellent apps that demonstrate how much better a complicated product can feel when the interface is designed around the way people actually use it.
I don’t think most frustrated Sonos users are asking for something unreasonable. Many of us simply want the app to feel as polished as the hardware.
So, Sonos employees: what is actually making this so difficult? Is there a technical limitation, a product strategy decision, a lack of resources, or something else that users don’t understand?
And to everyone else: what is the one change to the Sonos app that would make the biggest difference to you?
I think that would be a much more interesting discussion than simply saying that the app is bad.
Thank you, and have a great weekend!