Catastrophic premiere of the Sonos application - what went wrong? (film, 5m)

Yesterday, the CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, who had been the fearless leader of the company for over a decade, resigned after setting the Guinness Book World Record for the most disastrous app launch of all time. During his reign, the company grew from almost nothing to a multi-billion dollar manufacturer of wireless headphones and speakers. The hardware is so great that people are willing to shell out 500 bucks just to listen to carbon based life forms in its full sonic glory. Things were going great until a few months ago when all that brand goodwill was flushed down the toilet because they decided to completely rewrite their mobile app in Flutter and release it in a half-baked state, which ended up costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and the CEO his job. First day on the job, the new CEO comes in and immediately fires the chief product officer, and that comes after rumors that Sonos executives had completely ignored warnings from software engineers, which almost never ends well. It is January 15th, 2025, and you're watching The Code Report. But first, I need to get something off my chest. Even though smartphones stopped making headphone jacks many years ago, I still prefer to raw dongle my headphones straight into the USB slot. One reason I like that is because there's no stupid app to download just to make the hardware work. But that's just like, my opinion man, Sonos and Patrick Spence deserve a lot of credit for commoditizing the headphone and speaker market, but one problem with the business model is that once the market's saturated, it's hard to continuously extract money from the customers. As a tech company, Sonos wanted to build a platform with software and apps that controls everything that makes sound. Good idea in theory, but the execution was terrible. They pushed an app update a few months ago that was supposed to improve the user experience, but instead it rendered everybody's existing products useless and removed many of the basic features that people expected. Like if you had multiple speakers connected together, you'd have to adjust the volume for each one individually instead of adjusting them all simultaneously. The internet started freaking out and it received a flood of bad reviews on the app store. The bad reviews were so bad that it appears Apple had to step in and remove them. A few days later, the CEO then had to do the walk of shame with a YouTube apology. We're fixing the app as fast as we can and we're making great progress, but that's not nearly enough. He made the smart move to keep comments turned off and was right, the apology is not nearly enough. He lost his job and they're only giving him $1.8 million in severance, which is a sad amount for a CEO that built a billion dollar company. But how did this happen from a technical perspective? Well the haters are going to say it's Flutter's fault. They should have only used native code and never messed with any cross-platform garbage. But in reality, Sonos was an early adopter of Flutter back in 2020, and the app everybody loved was also written in Flutter. It appears the bigger problem is that the new app relied more on cloud services over the network, as opposed to just connecting to the speakers locally. This might be required to build a truly smart speaker system, but when they released the new app, they failed to test and stabilize all its new features, and it resulted in all kinds of connection issues for customers. But once again, this is not an issue of incompetent engineers, but more an issue of corporate executives trying to push out a product before it's ready. Here's what a Sonos engineer said in his own words. Luckily though, technical issues like this will be a thing of the past, because according to Mark Zuckerberg on his Joe Rogan interview, Meta expects to have AI-powered mid-level engineers by the end of 2025. That could be bad news for programmers, but Zuckerberg recently had even worse news for its army of fact-checkers, and Harry and Meghan are absolutely furious. Zuck is getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with an X-style community note system. That's a much better approach, but why has Zuck suddenly become a free speech champion? It might have something to do with the fact that Meta has ongoing legal battles with the Department of Justice, or maybe it's the fact that Trump once threatened to throw Zuckerbucks in jail, and now he's doing the best he can to play the victim. But I might also go to jail myself, because I've been using the trademark JavaScript logo in my videos. What you may not realize is that the JavaScript logo is owned by Oracle, and recently the team behind Deno asked them to voluntarily withdraw their trademark so that it can be used freely by the community. Well Oracle was like, nah bro, and now they're entering a legal battle where they'll start the discovery process to show how JavaScript is a widely recognized and generic term that falls outside the scope of Oracle, but it might take years before they actually resolve this dispute. There's a lot going on in the world today for developers, and if you want to keep up on it, you should be going to daily.dev on the daily. It's a completely free social platform that curates all the best developer content on the internet. Whether you're learning how to code, looking for updates on your favorite JavaScript framework, or want to find out if AI finally replaced you, daily.dev is the place you're going to hear about it first. What's especially awesome though is that it's not populated by bots, but real humans working in the tech industry that you can network with. When you install their highly rated and free browser plugin, you'll get the content programmers crave on a daily basis. Join over a million other developers right now by going to daily.dev slash fireship. This has been the Code Report, thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.

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Catastrophic premiere of the Sonos application - what went wrong? (film, 5m)

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