Sonos

On May 7, 2024, Sonos launched an update to its app that quickly became almost universally hated by its users. The update disabled features and disrupted key capabilities like sleep timers and volume controls. Longtime Sonos customers, many of whom have sunk hundreds of dollars into multiroom systems that suddenly felt broken, were furious.

A user of the Sonos app filed a proposed a class action against Sonos Inc. alleging it knowingly released a faulty redesign that had bugs that inhibited performance and device functionality.

Last month, Sonos announced that its interim CEO would be sticking around permanently. Tom Conrad had been serving in that role ever since his predecessor stepped aside after months of controversy following an app update that removed much of the functionality users had come to love. The announcement came in a post Conrad shared on Threads that he’d officially been asked to be the next CEO of Sonos. The message wasn’t long. In fact, the most important part of it was just one word: grateful. “Grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these past six months while I was interim,” he wrote. “So excited for the road ahead.” Grateful. With that single, counterintuitive word, Conrad highlighted a response that serves as a lesson for every leader. You see, when you’re faced with criticism, the common response is to get defensive. It’s tempting to dismiss those who might criticize your company or your products. It's certainly not typical to not only welcome harsh feedback, but to be thankful for it. Conrad's response might not seem like much, but in light of the backlash Sonos has faced over the past few months, it’s one of the most powerful things a leader can say—especially when that feedback has been scathing, public, and, in many cases, well-earned. Look, Sonos is no stranger to innovation. It’s spent the past two decades redefining how we experience music at home, building a loyal base of fans who prize the company’s premium design and sound quality. But in the past year, Sonos has seen that loyalty tested like never before. In May of last year, the company rolled out a massive update to its app—one it billed as the foundation for the future of its user experience. What customers got, however, felt like a downgrade. Features that longtime users relied on were suddenly missing or broken. Playlist management was clunky. Accessibility tools were gone. Basic functions like alarm settings and cross-platform integration were either stripped out or didn’t work the way they used to. The response from customers was brutal. Reddit threads filled with frustrated users. Support forums lit up. And tech journalists didn’t hold back. “This is a betrayal of the very people who made Sonos what it is,” one Verge commenter wrote. Others simply said: “I’m done.” That’s the environment Conrad stepped into—first as interim CEO after Patrick Spence stepped down in January, and now, as the company’s next permanent chief executive. Obviously, Conrad was familiar with the criticism. When he became interim CEO back in January, Conrad told Wired

Sonos is updating its app with new volume controls and navigation.

In May 2024, Sonos pushed a disastrous app update that broke multi-room speaker systems across millions of homes. Features vanished, volume controls malfunctioned and sleep timers disappeared. Customers who had spent hundreds or thousands of dollars building out Sonos systems – the kind of loyal evangelists most brands would kill for – were furious. Social media turned toxic with the crisis quickly earning the label of the “App-ocalypse”, sales slowed and in January 2025, chief executive Patrick Spence stepped down.

Employees Bloomberg spoke with claimed that internal frustrations were high close to the app’s scheduled launch date because the app wasn’t ready. Three former workers who recently worked there pointed to “yelling” and “screaming” in meetings as employees tried to warn higher-ups. Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when the app released. Spence admitted in August that many customers, “especially those with some of our older products in their systems, are having an experience that is worse than” before. Examples included “existing speakers missing from their Sonos systems,” “errors while setting up new products,” and latency, per Spence.

Sonos is very, very sorry for ruining your speaker system.

So far in the patent infringement legal tussle between Sonos and Google, the former has notched several wins. But a ruling issued Friday has suddenly reversed that momentum, and Sonos has now been dealt a major setback. US District Judge William Alsup tossed out the company’s $32.5 million jury verdict win against Google and said two of Sonos’ key patents are unenforceable and invalid. That could make it much harder for Sonos to challenge other technology companies in court under similar claims of infringement. “This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new,” Alsup wrote in a decision that strongly criticized Sonos for bringing the suit in the first place. “This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first — wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor’s products from an ancient application.” As Reuters reported on Monday, the reasoning boils down to this: according to the judge, Sonos wrongly linked a pair of patent applications in 2019 to a much earlier provisional application from 2006 in an attempt to claim “a priority date before Google’s disclosures and product releases” that would thus put Google under “a cloud of infringement.” Sonos is also said to have discreetly made amendments to the documents, which greatly frustrated the judge. Above all else, Alsup says Sonos simply waited far too long to raise any concerns of patent infringement. Here’s the key paragraph from the decision on that: > The essence of this order is that the patents issued after an unreasonable, inexcusable, and prejudicial delay of over thirteen years by the patent holder, Sonos, Inc. Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006, but it did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019. By the time these patents issued in 2019 and 2020, the industry had already marched on and put the claimed invention into practice. The entire ruling is a deep dive into Sonos’ history, multiroom “zones,” and other underpinnings of audio casting technology that Sonos and Google have now spent several years arguing over. In another part

Audio products manufacturer Sonos was hit with a products liability class action lawsuit Thursday claiming its Arc soundbar had a defect in what became known as the “Pop of Death,” or an unexpected loud sound, when used with Dolby Atmos, an advanced surround-sound technology.

His time at Sonos didn’t start out all that smoothly either. A week before he was slated to take over as interim CEO, Conrad evacuated with his wife and 1-year-old daughter from wildfires in Southern California. A few days later, his house was burglarized. After that start, Sonos has floundered with some hardware misfires as well. Leaks indicated that the company was working on a streaming box in February 2025, and soon after, that project was killed. Just this month, The Verge reported that Sonos is ending its partnership with Ikea. Despite all that, Conrad says he feels hopeful for the future of the company.

<table id="DataTables_Table_0"> <thead> <tr><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Cycle</th><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Total</th><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Democrats</th><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">% to Dems</th><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Republicans</th><th rowspan="1" colspan="1">% to Repubs</th></tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2024</td> <td>$32,196</td> <td>$24,353</td> <td>75.65%</td> <td>$7,840</td> <td>24.35%</td> </tr><tr> <td>2022</td> <td>$16,531</td> <td>$15,256</td> <td>100.00%</td> <td>$0</td> <td>0.00%</td> </tr><tr> <td>2020</td> <td>$81,340</td> <td>$78,808</td> <td>99.24%</td> <td>$600</td> <td>0.76%</td> </tr><tr> <td>2018</td> <td>$25,212</td> <td>$20,952</td> <td>100.00%</td> <td>$0</td> <td>0.00%</td> </tr><tr>

Sonos Inc has not reported lobbying the federal government during the 2024 election cycle.