I don’t believe there is a path to roll back a firmware update to a previous version. I suggest you call Sonos Tech Support to discuss your concerns. 

Unfortunately, rollback is not possible.

Does your router support USB sticks?

Thanks for the replies. If rollback is not possible, how do people rollback S2 devices to work with S1 firmware?

Will be really annoyed if Sonos have deliberately bricked our speaker. :(

Andre

Rollback from S2 to the latest version of S1 is possible for older units that support S1. Rollback to an arbitrary firmware version is not supported.

It also could be an Android update, the reason Sonos was forced to remove that ‘on this device’ function was that Google was changing their OS so that Sonos would be locked out. Much like Apple did several years ago now. 

Running Android 11/12 on our devices, so the potential future issues with Google’s Storage Access Framework on 13+ have no impact here. And Sonos lied about SAF too by the way, it’s perfectly possible to read files from local storage folders on any version of Android, but they do need to write their code following current guidelines to gain proper access. But I agree Google doesn’t make it as simple as it should be.

Andre

Sounds like we might need to roll the Play:1 speaker back to S1, and find a copy of the S1 app for all our devices (and two Windows PCs). Both versions have been pretty dreadful IMHO (sorting of albums by folder for example is very poor) but S1 is no worse than S2 in that respect. Nice hardware let down by inflexible software.

Andre

Downloads.

1. I think you need another S1 speaker to downgrade?
2. Can you still play music stored on an Android phone from S1?

edit: My remark under 1. isn’t mentioned here https://support.sonos.com/en-nz/article/downgrade-a-sonos-product-from-s2-to-s1

Your speaker is not bricked. 

You could indeed look at the other possibilities to play you music, from Youtube Music (free) to iBroadcast, to using a NAS or a USB-stick in your router.

Switching back to S1 won’t help you, this feature was removed from the S1 system as well.

It is from the point of view of playing local device audio files via Sonos’s app, which is exactly what it was purchased for. She has no interest at all in the vagaries of streaming services, wanting to play locally stored albums that she has already paid for. My wife was all for throwing the thing away when it stopped working and no obvious solution was available; as far as she’s concerned it’s now completely useless.

As luck would have it, I have just discovered from the Facebook Sonos User Group that the Samsung Music local playback app has recently been updated to include streaming output to Sonos, so panic is now over. Clearly their developers must be more capable at their job than Sonos’s if Sonos are saying it is now technically impossible to play local files (I agree SAF can be a an initial pain to work around, but it’s very doable).

Anyway, as long as it works again Angela is very happy - and she uses the Samsung Music app anyway when listening to her music on the phone’s speaker, so one simple app to do everything will actually be a better solution for her..  

Andre

That’s a good tip, using the Samsung Music player!

I'm on latest Android update but haven't updated my S1 system and I still have the function to play from this device.

Nice to see you have found a work around.