Will products drop off S2 app in the future?

Sonos has stated they will provide updates for products at least 5 years after production stops, minimum.  Most will be much longer.  The play:3 stopped production around 2 years ago I believe, so you have at least 3 years, minimum, most likely much longer.

Really, it’s too far out into the future for anyone to predict with any accuracy what exactly will happen with play:3s.  It’s going to depend a lot own how fast tech advances, whether features can be done with older hardware, and customer demand for these features.  Others may disagree, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that neither customers or Sonos were all that happy with the S1/S2 event.

And to be clear, no one has been forced to upgrade their legacy speakers. 

It took 15 years to go from S1 to S2, and the majority of S2 devices have 8 to 16 times the resources of the legacy devices.  However, to expect streaming units that must heavily ineract with others within the system to remain capable of carrying on indefinitely until the hardware quits is absurd in the era of smart devices.  To do so would mean no new features could ever be added, and nobody would buy them if they weren’t updated with new features.  

I’ve been a Sonos fan, customer, beta tester and promoter for all of those 15 years. I invested heavily into my speakers at home and office when the solution surfaced back then and still rely on the connect:amp legacy products. While I have spent tens of thousands, a friend I recommended this to long ago is in the low hundreds of thousands.

He called me this morning on this topic. I am sure a lot of people are talking about the upgrade to S2. Sonos support can abandon the old hardware but the apps need to have backward compatibility or people will ask “whats next?”.

The new features are probably great. But I, for one of many, will not convert to S2 if I cant control my old amps. Replacing perfectly functioning amps for thousands of dollars - even at a 30% discount- wont make me happy and I’ll research the alternatives for the first time in 15 years if thats the push I receive.

So let me use S1 on all devices with legacy functions and let me use S2 in parallel for newer devices and newer features. Maintain that for S3 some day.

Not going to happen.  I'd explain why in great technical detail, but you won't believe me, so why bother?  But I'll leave this here so you can come back to it later and realize I was correct. 

Well if it doesn’t make sense, your right. I won’t believe you. 
and it doesn’t look like I’ll have any reason to come back here

Oh it makes perfect sense, if you are willing to look at facts and know a few concepts of engineering.  

I have to say I do expect the hardware to be able to play music for as long as it switches on, even if it limits the more advanced features of the newer devices on my system. When I paid good money for the Play 1s I was buying a physical speaker that streamed music. I don’t see why software progress should take that away. I understand I may not be able to be part of the future, but I should always have option to continue as per the day I bought the speaker if I choose. Otherwise they should be sold with expirey dates. 
 

Anyway, I phoned Sonos and specifically asked if current S2 compatible devices would ever stop being S2 compatible. The answer was No. So anything that can use S2 now, will always be able to use S2. That means that if all your system goes up to S2 - you don’t have to worry about speakers becoming useless later (as there is no official downgrade to S1). Note: apparently you can factory reset pre 2020 devices that have been upgraded to S2 and then add them back to an S1 system - but Sonos don’t say that and the guy I spoke to stood by saying it can’t be done (although also conceded he hadn’t tried it). I was told it was possible by poster on another thread. 

So for the moment I get my wish above - if there is a future S3 or similar I expect the Play 1s wouldn’t be included - but at least I could choose to stay on S2 and continue to use them until the hardware fails. As I should be able to. If you currently have too much of your system non-S2 compatible, then now is the time to stick. No speaker will ever stop working, according to the latest policy anyway. 

Not sure what ‘in parallel’ means in this context.  You can run your legacy speakers in an S1 system, and have modern speakers in an S2 system, generally refered to as a split system.  If that’s what ‘in parallel’ means, then you’re good.  If it means something else, I have no idea.

Just wanted to check your understanding - this is what they are offering. You can run all S2 compatible on S2 and all S1 only compatible on S1. The downside is that they can’t talk to each other so you can’t group components on separate systems together. 

All 2020 devices and onwards are only S2 compatible which is the real rub for me. It means that if you are sticking with S1, you gradually will only be able to buy second hand (making sure those devices haven’t been upgraded to S2 - or that the factory reset hack I mentioned in another post works).