Sonos CEO says headphone launch was ‘overshadowed’ by app controversy

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said the new Ace headphones helped spur “year over year revenue growth” that slightly exceeded the company’s expectations as part of its third quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon. But he quickly moved on to address the company’s ongoing app woes, which will soon have a negative impact on Sonos’ bottom line.

“This was overshadowed by the problems that our customers and partners experienced as a result of the rollout of our new app, which in turn has required us to reduce our fiscal 2024 guidance,” he said in the press release. “We have a clear action plan to address the issues caused by our app as quickly as possible. While our app setback is regrettable, it is one chapter in our over twenty years of delighting customers. I speak for everyone at Sonos when I say that our number one priority is to make this right and ensure that the next chapter is even better than the previous ones.”

Spence is likely to face a slew of questions about the company’s current predicament during an earnings call scheduled for 5PM ET. Last month, he issued an apology for the bugs, missing features, unstable system performance, and other problems that customers have encountered since the redesigned app first rolled out in May. Just this morning, a temporarily cloud services outage caused problems for some systems. Sonos has promised app updates every day weeks as it works to claw back the trust of its customers.

It’s believed that part of the reason Sonos released the revamped app before it was truly ready is because the Ace headphones are only compatible with the new software and wouldn’t have worked with the prior version of the app. I’ll update this story with relevant quotes from the call once it gets underway.