I have 2012 Sonos hardware. You can still get the original Sonos S1 controller, which works with old stuff. It's pretty annoying that all the new stuff is S2 (and that app is better supported), but it's not as hard as you're describing it. You can get it off Google Play and just use it.

The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn't really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.

_Some_ of the software is there. They randomly intentionally broke the desktop apps for S1 devices.