Sonos Sued Over Bug-Riddled App Redesign

Case Overview: A class action lawsuit alleges Sonos's 2024 app redesign introduced widespread bugs, frequent crashes, and removed features, crippling the core functionality of customers' speaker systems.

Consumers Affected: U.S. consumers whose Sonos App was running any version of the App Redesign.

Court: U.S. District Court for the Central District of California

Sonos is facing a proposed class action lawsuit from 15 customers who say the company's 2024 app redesign broke the core functionality of their speaker systems and left them with expensive equipment they could barely use. 

The trouble started in May 2024 when Sonos rolled out a major overhaul of its mobile and desktop app, touting faster navigation, simpler controls, and a sleeker interface. But instead of a better user experience, the update brought widespread bugs, frequent crashes, and removed several features longtime users had come to rely on, including a popular alarms function, according to the lawsuit.

Devices often disappeared from the app, failed to sync, or stopped playing audio altogether.

The redesign didn’t just degrade performance—it eliminated the desktop app entirely, replacing it with a browser-based web app. Customers were unable to roll back the update, even when it rendered their setups unusable, the claim alleges. 

Within a year, the backlash was so strong that Sonos laid off hundreds of employees and saw multiple top executives step down, including the CEO, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Product Officer, and Global Chief Marketing Officer.

Customers Across U.S. Report System Failures After Update

The 15 plaintiffs, who live in nine states and collectively own dozens of Sonos devices, say the new app caused persistent problems: dropped connections, delayed volume changes, unsynced speaker groups, and phantom power cycling. Some users spent hours with customer support with no solution. 

Others, like one New York plaintiff, said even Sonos techs couldn’t restore normal function. Several customers estimate they would have paid up to $1,500 just to undo the app and get back to the older version.

The problems spanned Sonos’s full product line, from its flagship Arc and Beam soundbars to the Move, Roam, and Play:5 speakers. Many of the affected users had invested heavily in multi-room setups that relied on seamless integration—an experience they say was destroyed by the update, the lawsuit states.

Sonos Faces Other Legal Challenges Over Product Changes

Sonos has faced legal scrutiny before. In 2019, it was sued for discontinuing its CR100 controller after a firmware update disabled it. More recently, the company lost a key patent fight against Google, with a federal appeals court ruling that Google’s redesigned smart devices no longer infringed on Sonos’s multi-room audio patents.

Other major tech firms are also being called out for buggy rollouts. Apple is in court over defective AirPods Pro that allegedly produce static and crackling sounds and Intel is being sued for selling high-performance processors that crash under normal use. 

In their lawsuit against Sonos, the plaintiffs want to represent anyone in the US whose Sonos App was running any version of the App Redesign. They are suing for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as a range of state laws, and are seeking enjoinment, damages, fees, costs and interest.

Case Details

• Lawsuit: Bornemann, et al. v. Sonos, Inc. 
• Case Number: 2:25-cv-04656 
• Court: U.S. District Court for the Central District of California 

Plaintiffs' Attorneys

• Jennifer Pafiti, Jeremy A. Lieberman, Michael Grunfeld, and Jonathan D. Park (Pomerantz LLP)

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