Sonos Says They Fixed Their Software. They Haven't.
I own Sonos speakers. The hardware is legitimately good. But the app is glitchy. Sometimes it won't connect for a few seconds. Sometimes a speaker drops from the network. Sometimes the UI lags. I've put up with it because I'm locked in—I've got multiple speakers and don't want to rip everything out and switch to Amazon or Google.
That's exactly the problem. And it's why Sonos's latest earnings matter.
The company reported Q4 revenue of $287.9 million, up 13% year-over-year, with $1.44 billion in full-year revenue. CEO Tom Conrad says they've "restored software quality" after the May 2024 app disaster that crashed the company's reputation and got the previous CEO fired. Revenue is growing. Margins are improving. Everything looks recovered.
Except the app still glitches regularly.
When Conrad claims they've restored quality, what he really means is: we fixed the catastrophic failure and got back to baseline. What he's not saying is that baseline never was great. The app works most of the time. But it's fragile, and customers are watching closely because they remember May 2024. They know Sonos can break things badly.
The Risk Is Real
Sonos is now positioning itself as a platform for AI. They want to host multiple AI providers—Alexa, Google Assistant, their own—and let users pick which one they want. It's smart strategy: stay platform-agnostic while the AI landscape is still shifting.
But here's the problem. They're adding this complexity to software that already has reliability issues. Every new integration is another potential failure point. Every new feature is another place for bugs to hide. Sonos can't afford for this to go wrong because their entire competitive advantage—premium quality in a hardware category—depends on the software actually working.
The fact that I'm staying despite regular app glitches tells you something important: the hardware is good enough to tolerate mediocre software. That's a fragile equilibrium. If they add AI features and the app becomes less stable, that equilibrium breaks immediately. Customers leave. They go to Amazon or Google. Those competitors have worse sound quality but better reliability, and for a lot of people, reliability matters more.
Sonos recovered revenue after a disaster. That's real. But they haven't actually fixed the underlying problem. They've just hidden it under growth metrics and executive optimism. The test is whether they can add new capabilities without breaking things again.
From my experience using the product daily, I'm skeptical they can pull that off.