When setting up my Sonos home theater system , I had a persistent problem. I was trying to add a Sonos wireless subwoofer to my network, but according to Sonos' mobile app, the Sub was nowhere to be found. The app would throw a “Could not connect” message, or—even weirder—show me that I was trying to connect a gray box labeled “product” with a serial number that had nothing to do with anything.
“I thought the smart home was supposed to make your life easier ,” my husband commented mildly, as he watched me factory reset the Sub a few times, turn my phone on and off again, toggle Bluetooth, switch phones, and finally bang my head against a wall and cry before calling Sonos tech support. As we all know, I am far from the only one who has problems with Sonos’s new app ; the company pushed out a radical redesign in May that broke a number of key features—such as the ability to change the volume on some of its speaker systems—and angered countless longtime Sonos fans. Today, more than two months after the contentious redesign, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence finally acknowledged the general customer disappointment in a long note posted to the company’s Instagram account .
“Since launch we have had a number of issues,” he wrote in a hilarious tone of wry British understatement. Spence apologized for the frustration the update caused, and noted that fixing the broken app continues to be Sonos' “number one priority.” The post refers customers to the detailed l.