Sonos Roam does not work with Sonos S1 App

What are you like in high school. 

Nope. 30 years in software engineering. Nice comeback though.  When you can’t rebut the facts, attack the poster.  

I have to agree. Your hardware life is at the whim of a manufacturer that encourages purchase and then decides to no longer support it, which I totally understand, but to force you to upgrade as the system you invested in is no longer capable and even making the decision to no longer allow the hardware to ever be used again (CR100 for example) is not acceptable. What promise does any one have that Sonos wont simply disband S2 hardware and force yet more upgrades. They have a track record of ignoring loyalty and customer outlay that is not mirrored by other manufactures. 

Sonos promise is that they will continue to provides functional upgrades and support for a minimum of 5 years after a product is discontinued.  Based on history, it’s likely Sonos will support much longer than that, but 5 years is the guarantee. 

As far as comparing Sonos to other manufacturers in the smart speaker/wireless multiroom audio market, Sonos has been around for much longer than anyone else, so it’s hard to conclude what other companies would do when their original products can no longer keep up with modern tech. Even then, there have been a few product lines that are no longer producing products.  Bose in particular has dropped their original line and started a completely new line of speakers that don’t work with the old line. 

It will be interesting to see what happens a few years from now when Amazon and Google state they are no longer supporting their original smart speakers.  Although I doubt people will care that much, since their devices are much cheaper, and perhaps very few will still even be operating.

Well put. However, Sonos was a start up multi-room offering needing people to invest in the brand - which they did, often heavily - who have now been under under-valued and over-looked.

People do not need “forever” support, nor do they expect their products to perform all the new stuff; but I have not seen any legitimate reasons for why software cannot cope with different hardware platforms; surely the software should be capable of identifying the hardware and determining what can and cannot work? Windows 7 has stopped support but it has not stopped laptops from doing the basic tasks that they did previously. There has been little to no thought around compatibility. Sonos is now a bunch of compromises until I again invest heavily and my gut feel is that past performance is probably an indication of future performance unfortunately.    

You need to realise that for all speakers to be compatible they ALL have to run the same Firmware. That is a must if music is to play in sync around all the speakers.  it’s a fundamental part of the architecture and what it gives in syncing features it prevents older kit with limited memory getting later updates.   There is simply not enough space on older S1 only devices to have the same firmware that new products like the Move, Arc etc have.  This firmware gives you Bluetooth, Atmos, Music Swap features and whatever other new features are in the pipeline. 

That’s why S1 was created.  Otherwise the legacy kit would have ceased to work when the new Sonos app, with it’s associated Firmware went live.

It gets complicated, and it’s been discussed at length many times before, but the idea that any new feature can be added to the more modern speakers, while leaving the older speakers untouched, just isn’t accurate.  The older speaker’s hardware limitations hold back what the entire system can do.  So Sonos had 3 choices to make here.

1 - Keep everything on the same system, with limited ability to improve the system as a whole.  Competition’s systems would be able to provide new features that Sonos cannot since they were not held back by old hardware.

2 - Have an S1 and S2 system, allowing new products on both with different feature sets.  This would allow Sonos to keep up with competition, but would add customer confusion as to what features are available on what systems, and perhaps double that development, testing, and support costs.

3 - Freeze the S1 system, and only add new features to the S2 system.  This allows for new features with a less confusing feature set (although I guess some people didn’t realize S1 was frozen), while keeping the same development and testing costs while only slightly raising support costs.

The right decision would depending a lot on the volume of people with S1 legacy hardware, level of competition, and costs of dev/testing/support….all these that we really can only guess at.  It’s understandable to believe that option 1 or 2 would have been the better way to go if those options fit your needs better, but entirely possible that those options were not sustainable for Sonos.

Again, nothing I can’t disagree on, but the third option deflects a significant cost onto your user base and away from Sonos...a natural choice (especially give the tone of the CEO and approach by Sonos when announcing this). 

If you have the technical detail as to where this has been discussed at length (or even able to summarise here for general consumption), that would go some way to helping people understand things better, but without it we can only continue to assume; driven by the context in which these changes where announced: the user base is, and is expected to, support a significant cost of Sonos moving forward with the competition. Its a win win really, trapped user base, and sell more products to upgrade.   

And I would add the lack of effort with even trying to achieve any degree of compatibility shows; the S2 speakers dont work alongside the S1 system at an virtual assistant level, so users have to make a choice which “system” they want to use with their home assistant...when I can simply add a smart speaker from a competitor and still control both separately.

With Amazon Alexa you can simply create two ‘linked’ profiles and add Alexa to S1 using Account A and Alexa to S2 using Account B - both will be able to access the music service installed on one of the accounts (use same Sonos account for both, but use a different Household ID), or simply use free services like Spotify Free - alternatively, use a family music account.

It’s only slightly more difficult to do the same setup with two Google Home accounts.

If you have iOS controller devices, then it’s possible to play streaming audio in sync across both S1 and S2 Households - you just need an Airplay compatible speaker in each Household and can then group/play Airplay audio to both systems, which is what I choose to do. The two Households just have to be on the same LAN subnet.

So there are still things that provide a few aspects of S1/S2 compatibility… but Sonos are just trying to drive ahead, like all such tech companies, I guess?