Sonos CEO is out following disastrous app revamp that enraged customers

Could 2024 have been any worse for Sonos? The once-beloved connected speaker brand left its reputation in tatters after a rushed, misguided app update, then launched a pair of pricey headphones that, from all accounts, landed with a thud. 

Faced with a mob of enraged users, Sonos has repeatedly apologized and laid out elaborate plans for how it will do better. But sometimes, “sorry” isn’t enough, and now Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is taking the last option open to him: resignation. 

In a press release early Monday, Sonos announced that Spence is stepping down immediately as CEO and as a member of the company’s board of directors.  

Sonos board member Tom Conrad will take over as interim CEO while Sonos searches for a permanent replacement, the company said. Conrad, who was formerly Chief Technical Officer at Pandora, promised to “work with our team to restore the reliability and user experience that have defined Sonos.” 

Conrad has his work cut out for him, as Sonos is still struggling to recover from a jaw-droppingly bad year. 

Last May, Sonos rolled out a major revamp of the Sonos app that included a top-to-bottom interface makeover while paving the foundation for Ace headphones, which landed a month later. 

But the new Sonos app turned out to be a bewildering dud, hobbled by poor performance as well as the disappearance of key playback features, including the ability to edit music queues as well as local media access. 

Sonos followed up the disastrous app launch with the unveiling of the company’s first headphones, the Sonos Ace.  

The $449 Ace was greeted with shrugs and middling reviews, with many users disappointed that the Bluetooth cans couldn’t connected to their whole-home audio setups via Wi-Fi. (A “TV Audio Swap” feature that lets the Ace headphones connect directly to Sonos soundbars did get some admiring notices.) Bloomberg later reported that the Ace was “underperforming” in terms of sales. 

To be fair, the news in 2024 wasn’t all bad for Sonos. The company rolled out a new high-end soundbar, the Ultra, that was widely praised for its greatly improved bass response, courtesy of “Sound Motion” technology. 

Yet Sonos spent much of last year in damage control, apologizing over and over for the botch app revamp while slowing adding back missing features.  

The former CEO didn’t help matters when he suggested the old Sonos app could be relaunched, only to backtrack after learning that the underlying Sonos infrastructure no longer worked with the legacy software. 

So, what’s next for Sonos? Rumor has it that the company will unveil its first streaming video player this year, perhaps in the spring. 

But as for rebuilding trust, Sonos still has plenty of work to do.