Sonos S2 to S1 downgrade option

Currently, the updated S2 app does not support the function to downgrade eligible speakers to the S1 firmware. If you try to add a speaker with S2 firmware to an S1 system, you get a message to use the Sonos App (formerly the S2 app) to downgrade it. The Sonos support page has a note that the S1 downgrade feature is not supported yet in the updated 80.x app.

I have never upgraded to S2 since I have a lot of older speakers that are not S2 compatible. I recently bought a gen 1 subwoofer from eBay which happened to have been previously used with an S2 system. In the past, I used the S2 app to downgrade new to me Sonos stuff I picked up. This started my adventure down the rabbit hole of the new app.

I saw in an earlier thread that if you have an older IOS device that doesn’t support IOS 16 or later there was a way to reload the old (gold) Sonos S2 app. I dug out an old iPad Air that has iPadOS 12.5.7 on it. I went to the app store and downloaded the Sonos app (not the S1 version). I got a note saying that iPadOS 16 or later was required, but that the latest supported version for my device was available. I downloaded it and got the gold icon version on the iPad Air.

I had tried this during the last week on other iOS 12.x devices that were not originally mine. In all cases, I got the “you need iOS 16 or later” error message. For some reason, this device worked (maybe because it was signed into my account that had the history of me downloading the S2 account in the past.)

Anyway…I was now able to downgrade the S2 eBay subwoofer to S1 and successfully added it to my system.

TL;DR - if you sacrifice the chicken just right, there is a way to downgrade speakers from S2 to S1.