The updated Sonos app for iOS
Patrick Spence has left Sonos after eight years as CEO, following the disastrous rollout of an iOS app that left customers unable to use their devices.
Spence was originally the deputy to Sonos founder John MacFarlane, and took over the role of CEO from him in 2017. Unfortunately, his most visible impact has been the release of the revamped and subsequently failed iOS app.
Now according to Bloomberg, Patrick Spence has left Sonos. It’s not been reported whether he resigned or was asked to leave, but the company has promoted board member Tom Conrad to the post of interim CEO.
Conrad’s promotion and the search for a permanent CEO that has now begun, follows the company’s release of the new app in May 2024. The app controls in order to streamline the experience of accessing streaming content via the app itself.
Significantly, the new app replaced the old controller, and Sonos intended to discontinue its previous apps.
However, by July, CEO Spence was acknowledging that users had “experienced significant problems” with the app.
“I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” he said. “There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.”
The app proved to be unstable, as well as missing key features from the previous versions. Sonos initially tried dismissing the issues, and saying that everything would be fixed with a series of updates over time.
Later as complaints continued, and multiple updates failed to resolve problems, there was pressure for Sonos to simply revert to the old app. However in August 2024, Spence claimed that despite his having hoped to roll back to the old version, too many changes had been made to Sonos’s systems.
“The trick of course is that Sonos is not just a mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too,” Spence said. “In the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 [the previous app] is less reliable & less stable then what you remember.”
While the company has been under the spotlight for its software since the failed app launched, it has also continued to release new hardware. While some projected launches were postponed because of the app situation, in December 2024, the company launched its Sonos Sub 4 subwoofer.
