Spotify is going to break every Car Thing gadget it ever sold
The company’s only hardware product will soon be e-waste.
Idk who needs to hear it, but stop buying this shit. If it has a computer inside, but you can't flash your own software onto it, just pass. If you're unsure, look around, find the nearest Linux user and ask for help.
To be fair, next to no one bought this. And the people that payed $90 for this are probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
This is basically a dumb android device with one app - an auto friendly version of Spotify. To use it, you need to pair it to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, it assumes you have a phone in your car with Spotify on it.
Also it costs about as much as a cheap externally mounted CarPlay or Android auto screen. So, yeah. Not great.
If you want to put auto friendly app UIs in an older car, go get a cheap CarPlay or AA display. Those are platforms that have been around for a decade, and Apple & Google have long partnership agreements with automakers that are likely to ensure those platforms will be supported for years to come. Hell, Apple is still supporting ancient iPod connection protocols 20+ years later.
This thing was the Rabbit R1, but for a music streaming app.
Honestly this thing solved a very specific problem for me: My car has no good way to mount a phone for car usage so I've always kept it in the center console. Car Thing just put a remote on my dash for that with buttons for presets and easy song skipping.
I only got it for $10 though, and that was two years ago. It has convinced me to get a new head unit with Android Auto support on it for sure
A few months ago my wife wanted to buy an electronic picture frame and I had a hard time explaining this to her.
Edit: an internet connected picture frame.
Well ok, an electronic picture frame is not much of an investition and works without internet. Well, most of them. Ok, you have to research it before buying.
These fuckers disabled car mode in the android app to make you buy one of those and now they're killing it. I used car mode in my car and the moment it stopped working was when I cancelled my subscription.
What did car mode do? Was it when it switched to big old buttons? Mine used to do that until I got Android Auto in my new car...so up until about a year ago
Yep exactly that. My car back then didn't have Android Auto and this was the only way to skip tracks while keeping my eyes on the road.
Edit: looks like they brought it back later: https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-mode-testing/
So stop being their customer.
I did 4 years ago
downvotes are not to express disagreement!
so many comments here about adding regulations and "this should be illegal" and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior
but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior
just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn't make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn't mean it is the only effective check & balance
Everybody buy your music. These streaming platforms are trash.
Yes, yes buy. Do not sail the high seas.
Or both Bandcamp for the win
There are three morbillion songs and I have no idea which ones I like. Streaming platforms became popular for a reason
Yeah this is fucking peak internet snobbery. "Just spend thousands dollars on music" ok.
I just realised iTunes (store) is no longer a thing. Everything's just streaming now.
Time to bust out the walkman
iTunes was an unhappy medium. I liked how you can actually buy albums, but they gave the MP3s weird filenames to make it more difficult to move to another device. I did it anyway, but I had to find the right folder, figure out what track it was, and rename the track. I'm against it but it's still better than streaming.
You can still buy songs on iTunes and load them to an iPod, MP3 player, or in my case to my Navidrome instance for my own personal self-hosted streaming.
I recently encountered a song I could only stream but not buy anywhere without DRM. Kinda wild because it has over 5 million YouTube views.
If anyone knows how the buy Slow Song by The Knocks, lmk.
YT + Music is worth its weight in gold.
They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.
That doesn't help make money. The engineers are needed elsewhere.
Since that was their first attempt at hardware, I bet they don't have access and/or rights to share shit, as everything is owned by OEM.
Datasheets are copyrighted by the silicon manufacturer, not the product manufacturer, and usually covered by an NDA. Spotify probably couldn't release them even if they wanted to.
Even Google products have a longer lifespan 😖
I've since moved on to Tidal. Bought it at $30 when root mods started to be developed, but never really went anywhere.
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The bastards barely started selling it a few years ago. I feel like some responsibility should exist. It isn't a company that is going under, so it shouldn't be able to just casually kill the devices tied-service it only recently sold.
Agreed. Anything sold with the intention of being used with a subscription service should have 10 years of support.
Anything discontinued should stop being protected by copyright law, and the manufacturer should be forced to give every piece of information they have on that product.
Holy shit: "The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware."
So they're not offering to dispose of it, or even giving any advice on how to dispose of it responsibly. Just suggesting people should probably do that.
If companies are allowed to behave this way we're all screwed. Any efforts by the average person to avert the environmental damage caused by the waste they produce is completely futile and any politician who claims that they're doing their best to try to hold companies accountable is a liar.
I hate to break it to you but we’re way past screwed already.
We passed screwed like 25 years ago
We need new laws y’all. All these companies should be forced to collect all their e-waste as part of their products lifecycle.
If a company produces any product and the company has a market cap over $1billion, then they should be responsible for collecting and recycling all their trash.
I don't know how accurate this is or if it's still true but I remember hearing like twenty years ago that Germany has laws like that, including dealing with waste packaging, with the result that companies suddenly found ways to use more sustainable packaging
Remember kids, never place buttons for a service on a remote if you don't know if the remote will last longer than said service :)
This was predictable. Everyone has a phone. Phones have CarPlay and Android Auto.
The fact that they named it “Car Thing” made it clear that it didn’t have much of a valid use and that they didn’t really have a lot of confidence in it.
It’s annoying that they even created it in the first place. It’s more annoying that they now predictably are not supporting it anymore. It should be illegal.
It's a little annoying how the article only gives much of a hint as to what exactly a Car Thing is, beyond a "dashboard accessory", in the last paragraph of the article:
the product was more of a remote control for Spotify on your mobile phone than any kind of standalone player
It's worth noting that it was quite cheap and therefore a very good budget option to MacGyver music streaming into older cars.
Car Thing is basically the Rabbit R1, but for music. In other words, a cheap Android device, with one app (a car dashboard variation of Spotify), a scroll wheel, and a some shortcut buttons.
It works by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, instead of using the phone for the auto friendly UI, it pipes that UI to a second cheaper mobile device.
It’s truly stupid, and it cost about the same as an external CarPlay / Android Auto screen… which could display an auto friendly Spotify UI, and much much more.
I bought this for my old Cadillac that only had a tape deck and it was amazing (with a Bluetooth cassette). I haven't used it since I got rid of that old Cadillac about two years ago now. Pretty limited use case but it still sucks to kill shit for no reason.
I didn't know Bluetooth cassettes were a thing, although if I think about it then of course they are. What's the sound quality like?
The sound is honestly not bad, better and less hassle than an FM transmitter. There are 3.5 mm ones too that work pretty well but I had a few of them and they fail where the cable meets the cassette. I passed it on to a friend with a whole house cassette system when I got my new Cadillac
Stop feeding these parasites.
Either buy physical or self host!
Both. Buy physical media, rip the audio files and put them on your selfhosted music server (e.g. Navidrome). Or pirate the music and buy some merch to compensate the artists.
I'm waiting for some FOSS developers to hack this thing and run custom firmware on it. Or someone who creates their own "Car Thing" using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
imo they should refund everyone who bought one and collect all the devices to recycle.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it.
“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website.
“We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”
The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware.
Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year.
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I liked using mine at my desk at work. Phone in pocket, connected to headphones. Car thing on desk, controlling music
