How not to ship software: 7 System Design lessons from Sonos
Imagine unboxing a brand-new Sonos speaker, eager to blast your favorite playlist. But instead of seamless sound, you get:
A broken app that won’t find your speakers
Missing core features like alarms and local playback
Constant crashes that render the system totally useless
That’s what happened when Sonos released its completely overhauled app in May 2024.
Instead of delivering a faster, smarter, and more memorable audio experience, the new app wrecked multiroom audio setups, removed core functionalities, and left users furious.
So what went wrong? How does a company known for innovation make a mistake this big?
In today’s newsletter, I’ll cover:
The key System Design errors Sonos made – and how they led to failure
How technical debt and a full rewrite without a fallback plan degraded the app
How competitors like Google, Apple, and Amazon avoided these same pitfalls
7 critical System Design principles every developer should follow to prevent similar failures
Let’s go.
How the Sonos system was designed to work
When a user launches the Sonos app, it connects to the speaker management system, which discovers available Sonos speakers using protocols like SSDP or mDNS over the local network. The device management system handles speaker configuration and pairing and fetches device-specific information such as firmware version, current settings, and grouping configurations.
The content delivery network (CDN) interacts with the speaker management systems to ensure the latest firmware and software updates are delivered to the speakers and the app.
After setup, the user selects a music service (e.g., Spotify, Apple Music) via the audio management feature integrated into the app. This system fetches the required streaming URL for the selected track or playlist and relays it to the designated speaker(s).
The speaker(s) stream the music directly from the cloud, bypassing the app for uninterrupted playback. The speaker management system designates one speaker as the group coordinator for multiroom playback. This coordinator fetches the music stream from the cloud and distributes synchronized playback instructions to other speakers in the group.
This architecture had been working for years … until Sonos decided to rewrite the entire app from scratch.
Next, let’s break down what went wrong.
What went wrong with the Sonos app?
Sonos’ May 2024 app overhaul was meant to be faster, smarter, and future-ready. Instead, it was a complete disaster.
The company scrapped its old architecture and rushed a full rewrite. The result? A buggy release with missing features, unreliable performance, and frustrated users. Years of
Here’s what went wrong:
