Sonos' $30M app fail is cautionary tale against rushing unnecessary updates

I used Sonos ~15 years ago. I hated the app back then and thought it was the biggest shortcoming. It seemed too focused on the multi-room stuff at the expense of the music management and playback. It always felt high friction to me.

A friend of mine had a contact in Sonos and my feedback got back to him and we were told we’d get invited to the beta of their new app. I was pretty excited about this. I got it and it was basically a theme on the existing design. I was writing up a bunch of feedback, but the app launched to the public a day or two after I got it. They weren’t looking for feedback, it was already done and ready to ship. Though I will admit, my suggestions would have been core changes that would need to be considered well before beta.

I sold off my Sonos stuff a couple years later. What I find most surprising about the recent outrage over their app is that people ever liked the apps. Maybe they got better after I sold my stuff.

Just so corporate.

The ra-ra'ism internally within corporations is just so off the wall psychotic insane. There's such a vast human-organizational impeller pulling people towards agreeing, to getting onboard. Especially when it comes to legacy systems & old code, that desire to scorn the past & build a great new glorious future is such an overwhelming furious psychodynamical tornado.

Managing such an legendary-scale fuck up - strongly notable even against this backdrop of humanity being bad at this sorta stuff - is still most impressive.

This reminds me of a project manager I had. He promised a web app would be ready by x date. So he pushed and pushed. Never mind that the requirements had changed, he had a deadline to meet. He delivered but the app was useless since the users had no use for the functionality it delivered. Sonos had a similar issue; a deadline became more important than a useful app.

In my case, surprisingly the manager didn't get fired.

Discussion (16 points, 22 hours ago, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41198808

I own a couple of sonos speakers, and the idea is still great, imho. However, the horrendous way they treat the app, dark patterns, overall enshittification... I consider my speakers a write off, and occasionally use one or two of them as a makeshift internet radio. Other than that, I sincerely hope the company burns to the ground.

I bought one of Sonos' speakers ages ago on the basis that I'm probably the target market. I'm tone deaf and like background music. Their software annoys me to the point where I bought no further speakers and can't remember where the trial one is any more.

There's a mandatory app and a ritual for connecting to WiFi which is presumably intended to drive people to return the thing before it ever makes a noise. If you succeed in connecting, it forgets what Spotify is about half the time you ask it to play anything. I never did get it to stream audio from a local machine which really should be a feature.