Sonos chief Tom Conrad opens up on audio firm’s disastrous app replace

Tom Conrad is sitting in Sonos’ Santa Barbara headquarters on a sunny Californian afternoon, speaking concerning the worst yr within the audio firm’s two-decade historical past with the calm of a person who has already made peace with the mess he inherited – and began cleansing it up.

“The company would never have shipped the software if they’d known how it was going to perform in the real world,” he tells this masthead in an interview forward of the launch of two new audio system. “And so, unfortunately, another misstep was that the company was not well prepared to roll back the decision once they realised, and so the only option they had was to try to fix it.”

In May 2024, Sonos pushed a disastrous app replace that broke multi-room speaker techniques throughout hundreds of thousands of properties. Features vanished, quantity controls malfunctioned and sleep timers disappeared. Customers who had spent a whole lot or hundreds of {dollars} constructing out Sonos techniques – the form of loyal evangelists most manufacturers would kill for – have been livid. Social media turned poisonous with the disaster shortly incomes the label of the “App-ocalypse”, gross sales slowed and in January 2025, chief govt Patrick Spence stepped down.

Enter Conrad: a Sonos board member since 2017, co-creator of the streaming service Pandora, and a veteran of a few of Silicon Valley’s most spectacular flame-outs, together with a stint at Pets.com through the dot-com crash and a run as chief product officer at Quibi, the short-form streaming experiment that lasted barely six months. He is, in different phrases, no stranger to firms in disaster.

He took the interim chief govt position in January 2025, was confirmed as everlasting chief govt in July, and has spent the previous 14 months doing what he describes as “righting the ship”.

The turnaround has been methodical. Conrad made management adjustments, eradicated administration layers, ended applications the corporate had unfold itself too skinny in pursuing, and delivered greater than 50 software program updates in 2025 alone, each chipping away on the reliability issues that had plagued the platform. He restructured the product organisation in order that, for the primary time, there have been devoted, correctly staffed groups targeted purely on software program.

“We brought a lot of science to it,” he says. “We deeply understand, quantitatively, how the software is performing in the field, and every week, we address the issues that are most impacting performance and reliability. One issue at a time.”

When requested what precisely went so mistaken for Sonos, Conrad identifies three compounding errors: the corporate modified the app’s person expertise too dramatically; it launched with out characteristic parity, reasoning that solely a small fraction of customers relied on issues like alarm capabilities; and – crucially – it merely didn’t perceive how the software program would carry out within the messy, heterogeneous actuality of consumers’ dwelling networks.

“They comforted themselves saying, ‘Oh, only 1 per cent of people use the alarm function, we’ll add it back in time’,” Conrad says. “Well, 1 per cent of 17 million households is 170,000 people, and it definitely takes less than 170,000 people angry on Reddit to make a lot of noise.”

Conrad is open and trustworthy concerning the failings; it’s the form of autopsy most firms bury in inner evaluations. The govt, who was on the board when the app shipped, isn’t making an attempt to distance himself. “I feel absolutely responsible,” he has mentioned elsewhere. “This happened, at least in part, on my watch.”

The excellent news, he says, is that the chapter is now within the rearview mirror. Sonos’ share value is up 16 per cent over the previous yr. Internal metrics present the platform performing higher than it has in years, together with earlier than the botched replace. Community sentiment on Reddit has shifted from vitriol again to customers evaluating speaker setups and congratulating one another on new purchases. And now Conrad is able to begin the following chapter: new {hardware} that reinforces what he believes makes Sonos distinctive.

This week, Sonos launched two new audio system: Sonos Play and the Era 100 SL. Conrad is pitching them not as standalone devices however as entry factors into what he needs prospects to consider as a single product: the Sonos dwelling sound system.

“One of the first things I said to the team when I took this job is that I think we make really just one product, which is the Sonos sound system for the home,” he says. “Any individual device is just a way into the system, or a way to deepen your experience once you’re in. And I think, over the last handful of years, we kind of lost our way on that.”

Sonos Play is a deliberate callback to the Play:1, the speaker Sonos launched 13 years in the past that successfully invented the internet-connected dwelling speaker class. Tens of hundreds of thousands have been offered; 9 out of 10 are nonetheless in use, Conrad says. The new Play is a stereo speaker with twin tweeters, a devoted mid-woofer, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, 24 hours of battery life, an IP67 waterproof score, and a wi-fi charging base so it will probably stay on a kitchen shelf and be carried exterior for a cocktail party. It can also be moveable in a approach earlier Sonos audio system weren’t – with a utility loop and a built-in energy financial institution that may cost your telephone.

The Era 100 SL, in the meantime, is a stripped-back, microphone-free model of the present Era 100, priced at $289 in Australia – about $30 lower than the present mannequin. It is designed to be the only, most cost-effective approach into the Sonos ecosystem.

Both merchandise are at the moment obtainable for pre-order, with basic availability on March 31.

The technique appears conservative, and intentionally so. Under former chief govt, Spence, Sonos had been branching out: headphones, a leaked-then-killed streaming field, a partnership with IKEA that was lately ended. Conrad is pulling the corporate again to its core.

“We really are a category of one,” he says. “There are not other companies that do these things. And so, as frustrated as customers were, the vast majority of them, even the ones who were the most acutely impacted, stayed with us.”

Still, the belief deficit is actual. Conrad tells a narrative he has clearly been carrying round for months: a buyer whose dad and mom have been celebrating their fiftieth marriage ceremony anniversary. The Sonos system didn’t work for the social gathering. The buyer was furious.

“I told him, I totally get it, and we just can’t let that happen,” Conrad says. “It’s not just a speaker. It’s a soundtrack.”

Looking additional forward, Conrad is considering synthetic intelligence, together with a possible position as a platform-agnostic hub for conversational AI brokers within the dwelling.

“Just like we were the level playing field for hundreds of music service providers when we launched in 2005, you can imagine we could become the same kind of agnostic platform for different kinds of voice agents in the home,” he says.

It is an intriguing pitch, and one that might place Sonos as a uncommon impartial participant within the AI assistant wars.

But, for now, Conrad is holding his ambitions intentionally contained. He has informed his board he’s targeted on the following 18 to 24 months. He has loads of concepts about the place Sonos would possibly go in 5 or 10 years, he says, however after the chaos of 2024, the precedence is easy: make the factor work, and make it work each time.

“I feel really lucky to be so deeply woven into significant moments in people’s lives,” he says. “You have to take that really seriously.”

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