I keep my Sonos speakers because I like the hardware. In my home, the app still delays connections, drops speakers, and sometimes lags. Owning several speakers makes replacing the system expensive enough that I tolerate the faults.
Sonos’s Q4 fiscal 2025 results reported $287.9 million in revenue, up 13% year over year. That is a recovery in sales. It does not tell me whether the next request to play music will reach every speaker.
Recovery needs a household measure
My experience is not a fleet-wide reliability study. It does show why management’s quality claims need a measure customers recognize: time to start playback, connection failures, and whether an update keeps an existing system working.
A sound system has a demanding basic promise. When I press play, I expect the room to play. The hardware cannot carry that promise alone because the app and network sit between the request and the speaker.
Adding voice assistants or other integrations creates more paths to maintain. That can make the system useful, but I would want the ordinary controls reliable first. I am skeptical of a roadmap that adds ways to ask for music while the simplest request still fails.
The cost of switching keeps me here for now. Sonos should not mistake that for satisfaction. The next successful connection earns a little trust back; the next dropped speaker spends it.