Sonos workers shed light on why the app update went so horribly.

This was a miscalculation, but the article writer does not understand what Sonos was actually attempting here nor what was their end goal.

The reason for this bit of ridiculousness is that Sonos wanted to position themselves as a SaaS company (and have Wall Street see them that way), with recurring revenue based on subscriptions. The app was rewritten for that purpose, ignoring the needs of existing customers who were not sending Sonos any money on an ongoing basis. To the MBA way of thinking, those customer who’d already paid were worthless.

So in other words, the re-written app was intended to force new customers into a subscription model so that Sonos stock would be more appealing to Wall Street.

That’s the real story, not the Sonos-friendly propaganda in the Ars piece.