14 ms·

Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

77 points by sowbug 2y ago

smallerfish 2y ago
If anybody at Spotify with the influence to make it happen is reading this: please publish an open source firmware loader (or specs to build one, or similar) to allow community driven projects to be developed on this hardware. You'd gain a lot of good will by doing this.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  Seconded! This is a huge opportunity to avoid unnecessary waste in the landfill.
  - imglorp 2y ago
    They'll be extra cheap on ebay for a while. I see a few for US$20.
- jmc5788 2y ago
  Absolutely! It's nice hardware, and it will be sad if they all just end up in the landfill
- djc6 2y ago
  Seems maybe its already been hacked: https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/ https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/
  - nickthegreek 2y ago
    I bought one of these for $25 back then hoping someone would create something sweet with it. Well its still in the box, no cool hacks had been released last time I checked. I believe the thing barely has any ram. some subreddits to monitor: https://www.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpotifyCarThingJBreak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpotifyCarThingJBreak/
- Pfhortune 2y ago
  Here's hoping, but my inner cynic says it's unlikely since it doesn't do anything for those quarterly numbers. However, I am curious what could be done with the stock OS... This repo here seems to suggest that the UI on the CarThing is just a webapp: https://github.com/williamtcastro/carthing-non-premium-spotify https://github.com/williamtcastro/carthing-non-premium-spoti... If we could take this and rip out the existing frontend, I wonder if we could turn it into a Chumby-like device at the very least. Though I suppose the tricky bit is to enable the bluetooth connection for any kind of network data transfer...
- tangentstar 2y ago
  If anyone at Spotify is reading this, I just cancelled my account. You guys deserve considerably less money than you have now, but this is the best I can do.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    "I am very tough" It's not a great move, but I don't think it calls for wishing harm on anyone, let alone a majority of people who at most had a hand in making something you did feel was useful enough to pay for. It was possible to drive in silence before and it's possible now. Perhaps explore a radio station.
    - vsnf 2y ago
      Don't denigrate him, he's done the one thing that is simultaneously most likely to affect change at a company, and also the hardest thing for an individual to do: vote with their wallet. He's right, Spotify does deserve less money for their godawful decent into the lower rungs of mediocrity.
      - brailsafe 2y ago
        Meh, when I boycott a place I just revoke my money and/or review the place accurately, but I don't posture about it. When I get bad food at a restaurant, I might mention it if it's really rough and ask for something different, but I'm not going to berate the server or kitchen staff; unimaginable. People have enough shit to deal with, like fearing impending layoffs and the likelihood that because the product didn't bring in enough money, they'll be out of a job for god knows how long if they don't turn things around. I have personal grievances with my iPad, but I'm not about to say "If anyone at Apple is listening, I hope you do worse financially". I presume they were a bit upset and chose overly broad language, it's not a big deal either way, I don't believe they truly wanted harm on anyone, it just seemed like a silly tone to choose.
        vsnf 2y ago
        > I'm not going to berate the server or kitchen staff; unimaginable. Who is advocating berating staff? I don't see that in OPs post, nor my own. No one suggests being aggressive towards anyone. Saying the company deserves less money is a capitalistic statement aimed at the corporation, not its diligent employees. You're welcome to to silently withdraw your money from a place of business and leave them with no feedback as to why. But 'posturing' about the reasons of a boycott while also withdrawing money is a great way to attach feedback to an action the company might actually listen to.
- montag 2y ago
  There are engineers at Spotify who read Hacker News. They've noticed the threads. Maybe there's one reading at this very minute. Create a burner and speak your mind, comrade.
- saaaaaam 2y ago
  I think they probably fired anybody at Spotify with influence in the relevant teams in their Christmas cull. Which is probably why they are discontinuing it, because there is no one left who knows how it works.
imzadi 2y ago
So, how much did people pay for these devices that are now worthless?
- starkparker 2y ago
  $90 at release, not including the Spotify Premium subscription
luxuryballs 2y ago
I like how they don’t actually answer the “why” question, “streamlining” is not an answer. They basically said because we’re changing things and this is one of the things we’re changing. Not being snarky but imo it would have been better PR copy to just not have the question at all.
- yreg 2y ago
  I think they did answer it. Streamlining means that they no longer want to spend resources on this. They don't mind that their customers paid them for it.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  The weird thing is, CarThing is just a stripped-down Android with 512MB RAM, running a bare-bone Browser-engine to render the Web-App. It's a Web-App. So what's the effort to keep this thing running for a while longer? My guess is that they reached a stage where they should touch the OS again, and there's no-one in the company who can do it...
djc6 2y ago
I've really enjoyed using the Car Thing in my 14 year old Mazda CX9. My car shows no signs of failing, so I don't anticipate replacing it anytime soon for one with Carplay. The Car Thing is so much more convenient than unlocking iPhone with my face, opening spotify, futzing around on the phone to change songs or playlists or whatever. And its easily accessible to my passenger. Its a far better interface than phone for use in the car! Its one of the main reasons I haven't switched to Apple Music which is bundled with my cell phone plan. I guess Spotify just wants me to got to Apple Music.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  You can probably get a really nice wireless CarPlay compatible head unit installed by a local shop for less than $1.5k to $2k. https://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/All-Car-Stereos.html https://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/All-Car-Stereos.html
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > for less than $1.5k to $2k. A bargain compared to the Car Thing's ~$90 price tag.
  - Sanzig 2y ago
    You don't need to spend that much, especially if you DIY the install. I installed a cheap Linux based head unit (ATOTO F7 WE) in my wife's old commuter car last weekend. $180 Canadian for the head unit, $25 for an aftermarket wiring harness adapter. Took a few hours to splice the harness together and install the head unit in the dash. The head unit's software is definitely a little janky, but it doesn't really matter as all she uses it for is CarPlay anyway. It even supports wireless CarPlay so she doesn't need to take her phone out of her work bag - our brand new Kia with an expensive infotainment system doesn't even support wireless.
    - SkyPuncher 2y ago
      I out one of these ATOTO head units in an old jeep I bought. It works extremely well.
probably_wrong 2y ago
> What should I do with the device? > We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. It's not everyday that the manufacturer of a working product tells you "throw it in the trash". I wish someone would force them to make a recall instead.
- stefan_ 2y ago
  Taking the piss, people paid $80 for these only 2 years ago. Make the waste of a PM that decided "it no longer aligned with the Spotify vision" tour the globe to personally pick up these things and hand people back their money.
  - brayhite 2y ago
    You think a PM made this decision? Not at least someone at a VP or higher level?
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Exactly, PM's kill features but they don't kill products. This is a decision by the person who hires the PM. This is a VP/director-level decision.
- Elfener 2y ago
  That is ridiculous. At least they're not forcing people to throw away batteries.
- yreg 2y ago
  > I wish someone would force them to make a recall instead. It seems that they are refunding anyone who asks. https://old.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/comments/1d0ida1/just_got_a_full_refund_not_credit/ https://old.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/comments/1d0ida1/just_g...
adamfeldman 2y ago
If you paid with PayPal you can still file a dispute there. The seller in the U.S. was called Luzern (working on behalf of Spotify). EDIT: don't waste your time, PayPal auto-denied it because it's been >180 days since the transaction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  Small claims court should work though.
ClarityJones 2y ago
It's one thing to discontinue selling the product. It's another to discontinue service (i.e. Music) to the product. Did the hardware generate a lot of support requests? Does it require too much engineering to keep secure with updates, etc.?
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Seriously. I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this. If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).
  - esafak 2y ago
    That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Absolutely, just like I can live with minimum wage. And companies can still stop selling the thing. They just need to keep the cloud servers running and maintaining their integrations with the rest of their code. If maintaining servers for 5 years is the tipping point for them to judge that the product won't be profitable and therefore won't release it, then yeah it doesn't sound like it should be worth selling in the first place.
    - inkcapmushroom 2y ago
      I can live with companies not turning my 2-year-old device into a doorstop, yeah.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - 2y ago
yreg 2y ago
There is a DIY alternative: https://github.com/witnessmenow/Spotify-Diy-Thing https://github.com/witnessmenow/Spotify-Diy-Thing
- ejj28 2y ago
  Hardly an alternative unfortunately. The biggest benefit of the Car Thing for me was flawless voice control that leagues ahead of Google Assistant, the Car Thing was much more than a screen that showed album art.
  - ourguile 2y ago
    I have to second this, I've never had an issue with Car Thing's voice recognition. As you'd mentioned, even in a windy or loud car and with tough to pronounce names, it's always understood what I was asking - or opening the correct playlists from my library. I haven't found a similar replacement for that.
beardyw 2y ago
I am not clear where the sound comes from. Does the thing itself have speakers?
- djc6 2y ago
  Car Thing is just a bluetooth remote control for Spotify or other audio applications. The music still comes from the phone - to the car's speaker system via whatever method your phone is connected (bluetooth, aux jack, etc..)
  - beardyw 2y ago
    Ah, OK thanks. I had never heard of it.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    If that's really what it is then why does it matter if they won't be made anymore? There must be more to it such as always online DRM service also closing.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Nobody cares that it isn't being made anymore. People are upset that their already purchased devices are being turned into paperweights because they won't maintain the online infrastructure they required to use it. It's wasteful and unfair to the people who bought it and should not be allowed legally.
      - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
        Yeah I understand that. That wasn't my point. If it was just a "bluetooth remote control" as the GP describes it why does it stop working when some remote service is turned off? It clearly isn't one.
ChildOfChaos 2y ago
This is infuriating. I bought the CarThing for a Christmas present for someone just six months ago. I understand it was no longer supported at the time, but there is no reason why it couldn't still function as a controller, there solution is just to throw it away? Hate the PR speak here "This decision wasn't made lightly, and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged." So what superior listening experience are they committed too exactly? When all they are doing is lowering the experience?
- mingus88 2y ago
  When their main competitors have been streaming high res, lossless and atmos content for a while now, it’s rough to see them claim they are committed to a superior listening experience with 320kbps ogg being the best they have in 2024. Perhaps pruning projects like this helps them deliver on higher quality streams, which they have been alluding to for years now. Spotify Hifi was announced in 2021.
  - phito 2y ago
    The fact is, 99% of people do not care about high quality audio (me included)
  - ChildOfChaos 2y ago
    I'm not sure how it would. The Spotify Car thing is just a controller for your phone, it doesn't actually do the streaming of the music, that is still handled by the app on the phone. It's just a kick in the teeth for users that bought into it, I get it's a failed product but that should be the cost of business that they support it at least somewhat, it wouldn't take much, but they are killing it completely.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > I bought the CarThing for a Christmas present for someone just six months ago Depending on your jurisdiction, this may be a short enough window to warrant a refund. Or at the very least a chargeback.
Exx-on 2y ago
Yeah this is absolutely sh*t news to be getting in an email from Spotify... I use my CarThing as dedicated Spotify controller for my desktop PC and they're just straight up making it a paperweight rather than leaving in the current level of support for it so it could still function in the future without the need for constant updates (not that there ever seemed to be any anyway). I hope they think again and reconsider either making it open source as people have suggested or just leaving the current level of functionality. They will loose a lot of followers if they go down this road and potentially also get quite a lot of bad press.
ejj28 2y ago
Really upset by this, I love my Car Thing and the voice control Spotify built into it is second to none - it's quick, always hears me perfectly even with noise in the car, and most importantly, it actually plays what I want it to play. It seems like it's integrated with my music history, so if I ask it to play a song that I listen to a lot but it has a very common name, it'll still get it right - it's like magic. Google Assistant is absolute trash in comparison, even on the (rare) occasion that it finds the right song, it's super slow and half the time it won't even start the music. And good luck asking it to play a song that shares a name with a movie, it'll think you're trying to play the movie. Really disappointed that Spotify is going to stop me from using a piece of hardware that I paid for, and by making me switch to Google Assistant is going to make listening to music in the car hell.
- esafak 2y ago
  The Spotify app used to have great speech recognition built in. I'm not sure but a furor over its privacy aspects might have played a part in its removal :(
  - ejj28 2y ago
    The Car Thing is using the same voice control that used to be in the app, it's the only way you could still use their voice control up to now.
joshl32532 2y ago
And EU is totally fine with this? Should force them to open source it.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  They never sold it in EU iirc, only US. So this time, the US needs to handle this on their own...
Nextgrid 2y ago
What's most disgusting is the tone and wording of the e-mail linked in the Reddit post. It reads like they're outright delighted to be breaking your 90-dollar piece of hardware. Not even a fake apology. Tech bros are getting more and more brazen. That email would be fine if they were just discontinuing a feature of their ongoing service - it's disappointing, but you got value out of it while you were paying for it and now we're stopping and won't charge you any further. But this is a stand-alone piece of hardware that they sold without an explicit expiry date, in a product category (car audio) that generally lasts decades (as they are solid-state devices with no moving parts) and now they're outright making it useless 2 years later without any refunds.
- JoshGG 2y ago
  Agreed it’s obnoxious. It also shows the balance of power between consumers and large businesses internet companies. Best of luck safe travels buh-bye!!
  - foundart 2y ago
    See also the recent Sonos app situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40397777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40397777
- whycome 2y ago
  I would love to have a "real language" version of these corporate press releases. They sold a product, got your money, and now aren't just stopping updates but are actively bricking the device in 6 months. And telling you to throw it out 'safely' too. I wanna sell something that I can just disable a year or so after I've sold it.
rappatic 2y ago
How much work could it possibly be to simply deprecate the software, let alone open-source it? Flipping the switch to break every existing device is frankly malicious.
- gs17 2y ago
  Some discussion I saw elsewhere speculated that it was to avoid liability since they won't update it anymore, although there's no reason they couldn't open source it as an at-your-own-risk way to keep using it (or at least provide some documentation to the people already jailbreaking them).
peterallport 2y ago
I have never had confidence in Spotify's roadmap.
client4 2y ago
I was always surprised car thing didn't have an aux out, it would have made it so much more useful for older cars.
- montag 2y ago
  Yes. Absolutely. In many ways, I think Car Thing did the inverse of what I expected it to do. It was mounted on my dash for a total of about 5 minutes.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  How old are we talking? I've never owned a car that had an aux input unless I replaced the head unit - and if I replaced the head unit, then I would have Bluetooth too.
dgellow 2y ago
Off topic, but I cannot resist to comment on that line under the headline: > By Chris Welch, a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos So 13 years, that’s around 460 publications per year. That sounds pretty high, you would have to be writing non stop for more than a decade. I know nothing about the tech new industry but is that realistic or just a fantasy?
- shmatt 2y ago
  I dont know if i would call something like this[1] an article. Taking a bus ad and writing a few sentences about it. He seems great at copy pasting promotional emails he gets I guess [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674048/verizon-will-pay-you-to-switch-networks https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674048/verizon-will-pa...
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  A lot of "tech news" journalism is just copy pasting a press release. They might also be counting every single article they were on the byline for, but they might not have actually substantially written that much. An example is some review of the "Best Headphones" where the article is huge, but he only wrote a paragraph. I think you might also be underestimating how easy it becomes to just churn out article after article if that's your day-job. You're not writing literature or a longform article in the New Yorker; you're just bashing out 2-4 paragraphs, then rinse and repeat all day.
- jawns 2y ago
  Former journalist here. I worked at a business dot-com where the writers were expected to churn out at least 5 market briefs a day, and the majority of them did more. I also worked at a daily newspaper where it wasn't uncommon for me to write 8-10 news briefs a day, but they were largely just rehashing police reports or otherwise summarizing content that was already in front of me (as opposed to doing boots-on-the-ground reporting).
- rchaud 2y ago
  A "publication"in the digital media space includes 200 word blog posts, many of which simply link to other blog posts for the details. In any case, the "website writer" jobs are known for overwork and low pay, so these numbers are par for the course.
edude03 2y ago
I knew this would happen when they had a fire sale on these - but surprised that it won't work at all anymore. Hope they open source the firmware, unlock the boot loader so nerds like us can do something with it
rightbyte 2y ago
How can such an expensive thing be deprecrated in two years? It seems malicious. IoT devices need to come with some sort of "works until" or something.
collinmcnulty 2y ago
Don’t worry, by breaking your device, we’re allowing us to focus on what we want to do.
- malfist 2y ago
  Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make
AlexandrB 2y ago
> Thank you for being on this journey with us, safe travels. I miss the era when I was a customer paying for a product. Now I'm apparently some kind of traveller that's on a journey with dozens of companies as they try to find local maxima of profit.
- neilv 2y ago
  One benefit of LLMs is that you can now get copy like that without driving a poor human writer to alcoholism.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bpm140 2y ago
  At least they didn’t say it takes courage to brick a perfectly serviceable product. That was last month.
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
I guess Spotify has made the strategic decision not to pursue the consumer car market and instead to cede that space to Sirius. Because this absolutely poisons the well against anyone buying hardware from Spotify again.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  This product was always doomed. Android Auto and CarPlay entirely negate the need for this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mkeedlinger 2y ago
There are so many examples of this. It's been hard to express and advocate for my severe distrust of proprietary garbage (my choice of words isn't hyperbole in this case) to others around me. But with so much of this race to the bottom, I can't help but wonder: how much will consumers take? I'll admit, my FOSS prefering, DIY leaning use of tech is tedious, but is it worse than dealing with the churn companies force you (and your wallet) to deal with?
- rchaud 2y ago
  The cassette tape adapter powered by the cigarette lighter is the gold standard of interoperability. Today, most electronics manufacturers have sold off their operations, so we're left with proprietary pap like CarPlay and Android Auto.
neilv 2y ago
"So you're bankrupt and can no longer provide the product you sold? Is this just a legal switcheroo, or is your C-suite team really to the point of personally being out on the street, with their pockets turned out empty?" "Oh, goodness, no! We're doing great! But we already took that money, and we know our customers are too weak and airheaded to put law enforcement or regulators on us, nor to sue us for more than a free Big Mac coupon settlement received only after several years of foot-dragging. And most all of you pathetic worms will keep paying us money. If you can't hear us laughing at you, that's because you're plugged into one of our other products like a mindless zombie."
ryanmcbride 2y ago
apparently they're rootable so maybe some hobbyists will still be able to squeeze something cool out of the hardware (unlikely) but this is so malicious. https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/ https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/
ryukoposting 2y ago
It would be easy to flip a couple GitHub repos to "public" and call it a day. It would be easy to wipe proprietary IP from the latest version, shove whatever's left in a ZIP file, and upload it somewhere online. It would be easy to do literally nothing except publish instructions on how to wipe the flash. That alone would be enough to allow some clever people online to get a normal Android installation onto these things. Somehow, all of these options are too much for Spotify to stomach. Shameful. Honestly, I forgot Car Thing even existed. I hardly remembered it at all. Given how my car is over 20 years old and I make extensive use of Spotify while driving, I imagine I was probably the target audience for Car Thing. Makes me wonder if Car Thing's biggest problem was marketing.
- gs17 2y ago
  I had just remembered it existed recently, glad I didn't look into getting one. My assumption was that it had lost support but would work indefinitely, how naive of me.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    It's a nice well-built device, running Android and a stripped-down Chromium Engine to render the Spotify webapp. Which makes it even more puzzling that they can't keep it running...
    - roland35 2y ago
      This happened a few times at Meta (remember the Portal?!). I think leadership just wants a clean break and doesn't want any support calls, liability, brand relationship to the device, etc etc
      - ryukoposting 2y ago
        If they don't want support calls, liability, or brand association, then they shouldn't have made the fucking product in the first place! I know this is HN and I'm preaching to the choir, but it's infuriating.
skhameneh 2y ago
I don't have one of these and and this irritates me as a Spotify subscriber. The least they could do is credit accounts with Spotify Premium, for those that bought these devices.
- pjerem 2y ago
  If they had done this, like, giving 1 year of subscription for free, that would have been an ethical and environmental scandal but the fact they did nothing is just insulting their customers. I'm nearly a day one subscriber but i'm currently exploring my options to leave.
  - solarkraft 2y ago
    Tidal is alright. They're mostly fine with doing their job instead of bombarding you with new pointless crap all the time. They haven't made a car thing. They aren't doing podcasts. They aren't reshuffling their UI every week. Basically they're (mostly, could be even better) just shutting the fuck up and it's definitely nicer than using Spotify was.
    - skhameneh 2y ago
      I subscribed to Tidal relatively early and could tell the difference in audio quality with some songs. I stuck with Spotify because I couldn't justify paying more for a smaller catalog. I've been slowly frustrated with the changes Spotify keeps introducing... breaking my "Starred" songs by replacing it with "Liked" songs, tampering with song shuffle, and routinely switching me to "Autoplay". Some of the curated playlists have gone down in quality as well, they'll start off great and halfway through I'm wondering why the playlist changed so drastically. I can't say for certain the discontinuation of Car Thing will have me end my subscription, but I will say this is the start of a wake up call for how Spotify treats their most loyal customers.
      - pjerem 2y ago
        You should check back their pricing. What you said was true some years ago but now that Spotify increased their prices multiple times, the pricing is the same (in Europe, the family plan is even 1€ cheaper).
djc6 2y ago
Here is a poll on Spotify's community asking to open source it - already almost 800 "signatures": https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Car-Thing-Developer-SDK-for-Spotify-Car-Thing/idi-p/5437643 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Car-Thing-Develo...
- Wingman4l7 2y ago
  There was a poll with probably more signatures than that for adding "swipe to queue" to Android that they sat on for years until they finally implemented it.
aworks 2y ago
I retired my Car Thing three months after purchasing. All of the functionality was better on my phone with the exception of a large, tactile button. I didn't expect any refund here but it does remind me of when Apple bought lala, the music streamer, for their track upload technology to be added to iTunes. I eventually got a check from Apple refunding the $25 I paid that had enabled the ability to play tracks more than once, in this case, 100 of them. I wasn't expecting anything but it was a nice gesture. The Spotify experience continues to remind me I miss lala (and rdio).
IronWolve 2y ago
Any state AG want a class action lawsuit, bricking a device I use seems like a crime of some kind.
dwb 2y ago
[flagged]
matt3210 2y ago
They cant open source it, I think, because it's filled with stolen open source code.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
efilife 2y ago
> We're discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings. 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. But we just don't care. And what are you going to do?
rickdeckard 2y ago
I frankly don't get what's so complicated for Spotify to keep this thing running as-is. CarThing is a web application running on Chrome within a stripped-down Android core with 512MB RAM. What happened, vulnerabilities which are not disclosed now? I got one on sale a year ago, it's a really well-built nice device, would be great if they open-source the missing parts of it (the GPL'd kernel was released some time ago, but it's not the latest I think)
binkethy 2y ago
I don't know why folks would grow a dependency upon a middleman between you and your music collection. What's wrong with a usb pen drive full of tunes? You get to keep the files!
- hulitu 2y ago
  > What's wrong with a usb pen drive full of tunes? I don't know about you, but my whole life is in the cloud these days. /s
- s1gsegv 2y ago
  They provide a really pleasant service in return: new music discovery I may not keep the files, but if I left Spotify I’m still left with a list of thousands of songs I enjoy and almost certainly wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
talldayo 2y ago
Remind me why I shouldn't be able to put my own version of Android on this again?
- contravariant 2y ago
  You might incorrectly assume you owned the device you bought.
meindnoch 2y ago
[flagged]
rhplus 2y ago
Not surprising, given the awkward position the product was in, targeting customers who don’t already have CarPlay or Android Auto (lower end of the market), but are also willing to pay for Spotify Premium and a good smartphone data plan (higher end of the market).
- infecto 2y ago
  I think its less about high-end/low-end, after all carplay did not hit Toyota until around 2018. Its simply that you still need a phone to use the device, might as well connect your phone to your cars audio and use your phones screen.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    But the real question is why brick it? What requires so much maintenance?
    - jasonjayr 2y ago
      A wild guess? Maybe enhanced DRM so the audio path can't be MITM'd, and the digital audio data captured?
    - sbarre 2y ago
      Not that it's an acceptable reason, but could they be paying some kind of ongoing license for a codec or some other licensed software on the thing?
    - rhplus 2y ago
      DevOps, monitoring, support costs, ongoing security burden. You can’t just ship a device specific API anymore and call it done. Those services will have at least monthly security updates, plus all the shimming and API back-compact work that has to be done as the backend Spotify services change.
      - raverbashing 2y ago
        I understand, at the same time the api shouldn't be too different to what is used by other devices (otherwise they would be just shooting themselves in the foot)
mkopec 2y ago
I firmly believe that permanent key fusing to lock bootloaders should be outlawed. At the very least the keys (and schematics) should be released once the device reaches EOL. Otherwise we're just manufacturing e-waste.
- tedivm 2y ago
  Agreed. We really need some sort of regulation that prevents companies from bricking devices they sold. It's just so unethical, and wasteful, to put these devices out there and then just turn them into trash.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  Or just stop this nonsense of needing updates to keep things working, which then allows updates that break things. Have proper standards how music is transmitted. Have devices support those standards. Have those standards be long-running.
  - contravariant 2y ago
    Doesn't sound like its an update that bricks them, thought the article is a bit confusing on that point. Sounds to me like they broke the API (or just blocked this particular User-Agent)
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Situation: there are now 15 competing music streaming standards.
    - Aardwolf 2y ago
      FM and AM were only 2 and were long running
    - Galatians4_16 2y ago
      EU legislation on power chords gave us micro-USB phones, when USB-C could have been a better option, but a real solution would be let consumers decide inputs/outputs.
whstl 2y ago
"If purchase isn't ownership, then stealing remotely-brickable devices isn't theft."
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  *cracking Stealing devices is still theft.
392 2y ago
I was suspicious when they advertised on sale for $30 last year. Maybe Lina Khan will peruse the emails that lead to that clearance. Though it's no surprise Spotify failed at hardware given their general software competency. Broke the Chromecast app for years after the big mobile redesign. Not sure how it's possible to have such bugs in an app that shows three buttons, a progress bar, and a picture, but 2,000 engineers will find a way. Liked page on the phone app doesn't even load with bad service, which is like your umbrella not opening in the rain. Anyone know of alternatives, even alternative clients?
internet101010 2y ago
Would be nice if they just open sourced it but that would require Spotify to allow playback control outside of their terrible, janky apps.
sbarre 2y ago
What I always find so disappointing in these scenarios is when companies are too chicken-shit to just give a reasonable honest explanation to requests like open sourcing this to avoid them all turning into e-waste. It feels like adding insult to injury for everyone who put faith in the product/company. I've been a long-time premium subscriber of Spotify, but I've already decided I will never buy a hardware device from them (even before Car Thing came out) or do something like pay annually for their services, because I don't trust their commitment to anything for more than 30 days at a time at this point.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  The honest explanation is that they lost so much money on the idea that they grimace at spending even another hour of developer time on them. They don't care about waste, they don't care about the consumers, all decisions boil down to profit.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  I agree. It’s so obvious that they’re trying way too hard to _not_ be the thing that I’m paying them for (music streaming).
jensenbox 2y ago
Spotify: the new Sonos
- ornornor 2y ago
  Didn’t even sonos end up walking that decision back and let people keep the devices and get the rebate rather than bricking the traded in speakers? But only after public outcry.
Aeolun 2y ago
I think at some point we’re going to have to start regulating this. You can’t just sell people some piece of hardware and then make it unuseable a few years later.
- soco 2y ago
  s/think/hope/g
dagurp 2y ago
Unrelated but what's going on with the cookie prompt on this site. There's a bunch of cookies used for advertising that you cannot say no to. I can't imagine that this is allowed.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  Well this is about as legal as bricking (aka vandalizing) a device people paid money for, but hey when you're a company breaking the law/regulations is just normal business practice.
boesboes 2y ago
Spotify, another great example of the VC funded tech cancers that came to disrupt and turned out to be even worse then what came before… We deserve this shit, because we keep buying into it
snapcaster 2y ago
What are the actual practical nuts and bolts problems with making bricking devices like this illegal? Someone in comments mentioned licensing contracts and things that might require them to but that seems resolvable. This seems so anti-social, anti-environment and not even benefitting them selfishly. Just a waste
- ornornor 2y ago
  I suspect it’s just a matter of it being easier to tell people to bin it than going through the hurdles of opening it (legal, drm, engineering, getting a budget, publishing instructions…) Plus doing anything at all beyond pulling the plug sounds like it will cost some amount of money (no matter how little) so someone somewhere will have to convince bean counters to allocate a budget for and capacity it.
squarefoot 2y ago
Incidentally, I just installed Navidrome on my Alpine Linux server for test, and it's currently scanning all my local music library. The heck if I'm going to depend to any proprietary device/format that is going to become a brick, then e-waste, as soon as the company behind it makes it obsolete. Happened a million times and will happen again. https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ Yes, I would totally push for legislation forcing manufacturers to unlock bootloaders and release tech info when they stop selling devices, so that hardware can be repurposed; landfills are already full of perfectly functioning stuff that could be put again in operation if manufacturers weren't so stubbornly hostile to anything Open Source.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Are you going to hook speakers up to your server? I'm planning my Google Home replacement strategy for if/when they add a subscription like Alexa. I want an offline whole home sound system with independent room controls, seems like Navidrome might work...
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate. https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song. https://www.musicpd.org/ https://www.musicpd.org/
rkangel 2y ago
This largely feels like a failure of consumer protection. Perhaps my understanding of the legal situation is wrong but as a UK resident - regardless of additional warranties provided or not provided by the vendor - products should work for a "reasonable" length of time and you are entitled to replacement or refund if they fail. Obviously I would expect an electronic device like this to last more than 2 years, so if Spotify is going to cause it to stop working then they'd have to refund me. Having to do that for their entire customer base would probably result in some different decision making! Obviously this product was only sold in the US (AFAIK), which has much less in the way of consumer protection, which allows for this crappy treatment of consumers.
Raed667 2y ago
Spotify stopped making Car Thing around July 2022 [0] But the device has also been jailbroken for a couple of years now [1] It even runs Debian [2] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280357/spotify-stops-manufacturing-car-thing-q2-2022-earnings https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280357/spotify-stops-ma... [1] https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineering/issues/15 https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer... [2] https://github.com/bishopdynamics/superbird-debian-kiosk https://github.com/bishopdynamics/superbird-debian-kiosk
micromacrofoot 2y ago
It seemed clear they were at end of life when they started selling them for next to nothing last year. We really need legislation to unlock devices like this when they reach EOL, the hardware here is very simple and could easily be reused.
yareal 2y ago
It's surprising to me that people see examples like this and somehow still think, "well, it's one bad apple. One bad decision from one company" rather than a systematic problem with incentive structures. Capitalism, and particularly capitalism that emphasizes profit, warps incentives away from building things for people. And we have other functioning models! Open source is about as close to anarchist theory in practice as there is, for example. "Wellbeing for all" isn't some pipe dream we could never achieve, FOSS is built on the principle of "I'll build it, use it if you like. Help me if you can."
phkahler 2y ago
When IoT means InOperable Technology! :-)
somnic 2y ago
[flagged]
- yareal 2y ago
  Blaming the victim of a con is just intellectual elitism. Everyone, literally everyone is vulnerable to a con that's obvious to someone else. Sure, tech cons are more obvious to us technical folk, but we have our own blind spots in other industries we are vulnerable to. (I cannot be as sure I I'm not being conned by construction, automotive, medical, or education industries, for example.) Continue to hold the con artists in contempt, not their victims.
tiborsaas 2y ago
What the hell are they discontinuing? The hardware won't change. Streaming MP3 shouldn't be rocket science that requires 50 engineers. Even if the internal API-s change, can't they just create mappings the devices need? They are not even willing to put that effort in. So sad to see software companies treat hardware as a failed hobby project then flat out say customers to bring their devices to an e-waste dump like they do in their FAQ.
- ornornor 2y ago
  > 50 engineers 50?? Try 1600+ (from https://engineering.atspotify.com/opensource/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/opensource/)
  - tiborsaas 2y ago
    I was referring to the team to maintain Car Thing :)
wink 2y ago
At first I thought it was an Onion headline, as if "Car Thing" was a real name...
polotics 2y ago
Are there not already "right to repair" laws that clearly give the user of a legally purchased device that stops functioning because of a defect (even if the defect's origin is that Spotify has defectuous management) the right to repair that device? I do not see how the right to repair does not mandate that Spotify publish any and all keys and documentation to allow the purchased devices to be repaired. RIGHT?
big_dinghy 2y ago
Spotify only offers chat support via its website. Attempts to receive a refund have been met with request for customer location and receipt. Support mentions the backend team will reach out by email, "after a few hours." No followup has been sent after 24 hours and requests for update. As a decade-long Spotify premium user, I am disappointed by this poor experience and wastefulness. Over the course of using their product, there have been few new, impactful features. I do not believe the company can offer a compelling service at their pricepoint and will seek alternatives.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  > Over the course of using their product, there have been few new, impactful features. What new features do you want for a music player? Better audio quality? More discovery features? Lower memory usage? More responsive UI?
  - haiku2077 2y ago
    I switched to Apple Music because of Apple Music Classical (browsing and curation of classical music is very different from popular music.) I'd love a similar feature set for Jazz.
    - wjnc 2y ago
      Concertmaster is available as a paid companion app to Spotify. (For others interested in classical.)
  - sublinear 2y ago
    > What new features do you want for a music player? Better audio quality? More discovery features? Lower memory usage? More responsive UI? You just perfectly highlighted the business mindset that never fixes a goddamn thing they rushed out.
  - vsnf 2y ago
    I can think of ten thousand things I'd like the Spotify player to do. - First of all, stop changing the layout every goddamn day - Stop pushing podcasts - Better 'ignore' functionality so I can listen to something without it influencing my recommendations. I know Private Mode exists but it's clumsy and all-or-nothing. I want it to be more granular and available on an as-needed basis. - Support for player cursors, which is like 'queue', but with the ability to tell Spotify to 'resume playing from this point in the playlist'. Maybe even expand this, and add multiple simultaneous cursor support, allowing for on-demand blackout zones or something. - Bring back the 30 second press-to-hold song preview. Removing this feature was a crime. "low usage" my ass, so what? Keep it in, you scoundrels, even the SDK still supports it. - Support for song start/end offsets. This is the #1 most requested feature on their feedback forums, has been open for 10 years, and they only ever occasionally chime in to say "we hear you, but not right now". If the issue is legal, just say so and stop leading us all on. - Allow me to re-order my Liked Songs. - Do what Apple Music did and require artists upload lyrics. Partnering with Genius was a dumb move. Genius is inconsistently available, and more often than not, just straight up incorrect. There are so many more. Their UI is just barely on the right side of acceptable and not one inch further than that. I stay on Spotify because their music discovery is really excellent, I look forward to the new recommendations from Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and I think the Spotify Wrapped is a lot of fun every year. But as a music player, it is deficient to the highest degree.
mvdtnz 2y ago
How could they discontinue this product due to low demand when it was released to market in February 2022 and discontinued in July 2022? It wasn't on shelves long enough to assess demand.
- evanb 2y ago
  What surprised me in the article was > “The goal of our Car Thing exploration in the U.S. was to learn more about how people listen in the car,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. The goal was not to build a consumer device for users who actually wanted to use the damned thing! So it apparently was never about demand to begin with, it was a learning exercise. Apparently the RLHF was so disastrous it only took 5 months to train this feature out of Spotify's business plan.
- wildzzz 2y ago
  They were probably selling it at a loss or at least not enough profit to have it stand on its own. It only works with Spotify premium accounts so they could easily see who bought one and upgraded their account to use it. I'm guessing they just saw mostly existing premium users buying them and definitely not enough of them. There are plenty of ways to get audio off your phone and into your non-bluetooth car stereo for less money so it's more of a luxury than a necessity. Who is this product for? Someone that is willing to spend money on a relatively expensive Bluetooth receiver and a premium account and someone that is driving an older car (possibly 8-10 years old at least) that lacks bluetooth. Frugal car owners might not have a lot of overlap with those with the disposable income for premium audio equipment and music subscriptions. For $100, you can pretty much buy a new stereo that has Bluetooth and you don't need Spotify premium to use it. Even just $15 on Amazon will buy you a Bluetooth receiver that works with your car's aux jack or a cassette adapter. It's a neat device and definitely filled a niche for some people but it wasn't going to convert many users to a paid account.
throwaway4220 2y ago
It’s ok because they “deeply appreciate” our “support” (money). What the hell does this even mean? I was happy with this on my old civic. Now I’m switching to tidal.
Always42 2y ago
Rant: I have all my shitify notifications turned off in the app. But, I still get those obnoxious "concert near you" banner that pushes the display down (changing all the button locations that I have memorized) and doesn't disapeered ubtil you click the tiny x. It drives me bonkers. I pay for family and am considering moving everyone to deezer out of spite
- ozozozd 2y ago
  Fair concern. You could be driving. And given the performance of their car UI and integration with car play, this banner could cause an accident.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
joshstrange 2y ago
I think it’s about time for me to give Apple Music another try. I don’t care for the direction that Spotify has been going over the last few years, especially with podcasts and audiobooks in the app. Spotify is a blight on the podcast ecosystem. I really don’t like Spotify‘s attitude towards Apple and cutting off their own nose to spite their face (See AirPlay 2) and the only reason I was still using Spotify is some of the UI/UX, which has gotten worse and worse over the last few years. At one point I cared about the ability to integrate nicely with my Amazon echoes (it was much nicer than the Apple Music integration at the time) which I’ve been replacing with Sonos speakers anyways, which support AirPlay 2.
elintknower 2y ago
This was a stupid product to begin with. It solved a non-existent problem and had to... pair to your phone to work anyways which begs the question... why not literally just use the spotify app on your phone?
- wildzzz 2y ago
  It has aux output which is the only way to input audio for many older cars. Your phone automatically connects via Bluetooth and you have a convenient display on the dash you can use to see what's playing and change the song. Not too many smartphones still have headphones jacks and having to connect your phone each time in the car with a USB to aux adapter cable is a little annoying. It also flexes all of the features Bluetooth audio supports (like album art) that even cars with Bluetooth don't always do. I almost bought one for my car but instead just cobbled together something using an FM modulator that was near useless in my area and a tape deck adapter. Works great and I have some basic playback controls in easy reach although a screen would have been nice. Buying an aftermarket stereo with Bluetooth would have been pretty expensive with the massive trim kit and the other crap I'd have to buy to keep my steering wheel controls working. I've also seen people using it on home stereos systems as well. It's a perfect device to fill a specific niche for when you want Bluetooth audio but your existing audio system only has aux input or a tape deck.
charles_f 2y ago
My favorite part of the announcement > This decision wasn't made lightly "We thought long and hard about the money we make and the stuff we sold our customers, and frowned when we realized we prefer the former" > and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged That is: unless you are using car thing, in which case your experience will become much worse
pjfin123 2y ago
Someone should jailbreak it and publish a method for installing Linux on the hardware
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  It's an android device. There are already guides online for customising it using ADB. (mostly to get it to work without a premium account)
friend_and_foe 2y ago
Friendly reminder that if a you agree to a terms of service for a hardware device you don't own it. It's one thing for software to be a service. Hardware? No thanks. I will never, ever "buy "something still controlled by the manufacturer after I take it home, and I discourage everyone from doing so.
csiegert 2y ago
Mail the device to Spotify’s headquarters. Better, a Swedish artist should build a memorial made of these devices in front of Spotify’s headquarters.

77 points by sowbug 2y ago

If anybody at Spotify with the influence to make it happen is reading this: please publish an open source firmware loader (or specs to build one, or similar) to allow community driven projects to be developed on this hardware. You'd gain a lot of good will by doing this.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
Seconded! This is a huge opportunity to avoid unnecessary waste in the landfill.
- imglorp 2y ago
  They'll be extra cheap on ebay for a while. I see a few for US$20.
jmc5788 2y ago
Absolutely! It's nice hardware, and it will be sad if they all just end up in the landfill
djc6 2y ago
Seems maybe its already been hacked: https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/ https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  I bought one of these for $25 back then hoping someone would create something sweet with it. Well its still in the box, no cool hacks had been released last time I checked. I believe the thing barely has any ram. some subreddits to monitor: https://www.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpotifyCarThingJBreak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpotifyCarThingJBreak/
Pfhortune 2y ago
Here's hoping, but my inner cynic says it's unlikely since it doesn't do anything for those quarterly numbers. However, I am curious what could be done with the stock OS... This repo here seems to suggest that the UI on the CarThing is just a webapp: https://github.com/williamtcastro/carthing-non-premium-spotify https://github.com/williamtcastro/carthing-non-premium-spoti... If we could take this and rip out the existing frontend, I wonder if we could turn it into a Chumby-like device at the very least. Though I suppose the tricky bit is to enable the bluetooth connection for any kind of network data transfer...
tangentstar 2y ago
If anyone at Spotify is reading this, I just cancelled my account. You guys deserve considerably less money than you have now, but this is the best I can do.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  "I am very tough" It's not a great move, but I don't think it calls for wishing harm on anyone, let alone a majority of people who at most had a hand in making something you did feel was useful enough to pay for. It was possible to drive in silence before and it's possible now. Perhaps explore a radio station.
  - vsnf 2y ago
    Don't denigrate him, he's done the one thing that is simultaneously most likely to affect change at a company, and also the hardest thing for an individual to do: vote with their wallet. He's right, Spotify does deserve less money for their godawful decent into the lower rungs of mediocrity.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      Meh, when I boycott a place I just revoke my money and/or review the place accurately, but I don't posture about it. When I get bad food at a restaurant, I might mention it if it's really rough and ask for something different, but I'm not going to berate the server or kitchen staff; unimaginable. People have enough shit to deal with, like fearing impending layoffs and the likelihood that because the product didn't bring in enough money, they'll be out of a job for god knows how long if they don't turn things around. I have personal grievances with my iPad, but I'm not about to say "If anyone at Apple is listening, I hope you do worse financially". I presume they were a bit upset and chose overly broad language, it's not a big deal either way, I don't believe they truly wanted harm on anyone, it just seemed like a silly tone to choose.
      - vsnf 2y ago
        > I'm not going to berate the server or kitchen staff; unimaginable. Who is advocating berating staff? I don't see that in OPs post, nor my own. No one suggests being aggressive towards anyone. Saying the company deserves less money is a capitalistic statement aimed at the corporation, not its diligent employees. You're welcome to to silently withdraw your money from a place of business and leave them with no feedback as to why. But 'posturing' about the reasons of a boycott while also withdrawing money is a great way to attach feedback to an action the company might actually listen to.
montag 2y ago
There are engineers at Spotify who read Hacker News. They've noticed the threads. Maybe there's one reading at this very minute. Create a burner and speak your mind, comrade.
saaaaaam 2y ago
I think they probably fired anybody at Spotify with influence in the relevant teams in their Christmas cull. Which is probably why they are discontinuing it, because there is no one left who knows how it works.

imzadi 2y ago

So, how much did people pay for these devices that are now worthless?

starkparker 2y ago
$90 at release, not including the Spotify Premium subscription

luxuryballs 2y ago

I like how they don’t actually answer the “why” question, “streamlining” is not an answer. They basically said because we’re changing things and this is one of the things we’re changing. Not being snarky but imo it would have been better PR copy to just not have the question at all.

yreg 2y ago
I think they did answer it. Streamlining means that they no longer want to spend resources on this. They don't mind that their customers paid them for it.
rickdeckard 2y ago
The weird thing is, CarThing is just a stripped-down Android with 512MB RAM, running a bare-bone Browser-engine to render the Web-App. It's a Web-App. So what's the effort to keep this thing running for a while longer? My guess is that they reached a stage where they should touch the OS again, and there's no-one in the company who can do it...

djc6 2y ago

I've really enjoyed using the Car Thing in my 14 year old Mazda CX9. My car shows no signs of failing, so I don't anticipate replacing it anytime soon for one with Carplay. The Car Thing is so much more convenient than unlocking iPhone with my face, opening spotify, futzing around on the phone to change songs or playlists or whatever. And its easily accessible to my passenger. Its a far better interface than phone for use in the car! Its one of the main reasons I haven't switched to Apple Music which is bundled with my cell phone plan. I guess Spotify just wants me to got to Apple Music.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
You can probably get a really nice wireless CarPlay compatible head unit installed by a local shop for less than $1.5k to $2k. https://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/All-Car-Stereos.html https://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/All-Car-Stereos.html
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > for less than $1.5k to $2k. A bargain compared to the Car Thing's ~$90 price tag.
- Sanzig 2y ago
  You don't need to spend that much, especially if you DIY the install. I installed a cheap Linux based head unit (ATOTO F7 WE) in my wife's old commuter car last weekend. $180 Canadian for the head unit, $25 for an aftermarket wiring harness adapter. Took a few hours to splice the harness together and install the head unit in the dash. The head unit's software is definitely a little janky, but it doesn't really matter as all she uses it for is CarPlay anyway. It even supports wireless CarPlay so she doesn't need to take her phone out of her work bag - our brand new Kia with an expensive infotainment system doesn't even support wireless.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    I out one of these ATOTO head units in an old jeep I bought. It works extremely well.

probably_wrong 2y ago

> What should I do with the device? > We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. It's not everyday that the manufacturer of a working product tells you "throw it in the trash". I wish someone would force them to make a recall instead.

stefan_ 2y ago
Taking the piss, people paid $80 for these only 2 years ago. Make the waste of a PM that decided "it no longer aligned with the Spotify vision" tour the globe to personally pick up these things and hand people back their money.
- brayhite 2y ago
  You think a PM made this decision? Not at least someone at a VP or higher level?
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Exactly, PM's kill features but they don't kill products. This is a decision by the person who hires the PM. This is a VP/director-level decision.
Elfener 2y ago
That is ridiculous. At least they're not forcing people to throw away batteries.
yreg 2y ago
> I wish someone would force them to make a recall instead. It seems that they are refunding anyone who asks. https://old.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/comments/1d0ida1/just_got_a_full_refund_not_credit/ https://old.reddit.com/r/carthinghax/comments/1d0ida1/just_g...

adamfeldman 2y ago

If you paid with PayPal you can still file a dispute there. The seller in the U.S. was called Luzern (working on behalf of Spotify). EDIT: don't waste your time, PayPal auto-denied it because it's been >180 days since the transaction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nextgrid 2y ago
Small claims court should work though.

ClarityJones 2y ago

It's one thing to discontinue selling the product. It's another to discontinue service (i.e. Music) to the product. Did the hardware generate a lot of support requests? Does it require too much engineering to keep secure with updates, etc.?

crazygringo 2y ago
Seriously. I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this. If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).
- esafak 2y ago
  That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Absolutely, just like I can live with minimum wage. And companies can still stop selling the thing. They just need to keep the cloud servers running and maintaining their integrations with the rest of their code. If maintaining servers for 5 years is the tipping point for them to judge that the product won't be profitable and therefore won't release it, then yeah it doesn't sound like it should be worth selling in the first place.
  - inkcapmushroom 2y ago
    I can live with companies not turning my 2-year-old device into a doorstop, yeah.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - 2y ago

yreg 2y ago

There is a DIY alternative: https://github.com/witnessmenow/Spotify-Diy-Thing https://github.com/witnessmenow/Spotify-Diy-Thing

ejj28 2y ago
Hardly an alternative unfortunately. The biggest benefit of the Car Thing for me was flawless voice control that leagues ahead of Google Assistant, the Car Thing was much more than a screen that showed album art.
- ourguile 2y ago
  I have to second this, I've never had an issue with Car Thing's voice recognition. As you'd mentioned, even in a windy or loud car and with tough to pronounce names, it's always understood what I was asking - or opening the correct playlists from my library. I haven't found a similar replacement for that.

beardyw 2y ago

I am not clear where the sound comes from. Does the thing itself have speakers?

djc6 2y ago
Car Thing is just a bluetooth remote control for Spotify or other audio applications. The music still comes from the phone - to the car's speaker system via whatever method your phone is connected (bluetooth, aux jack, etc..)
- beardyw 2y ago
  Ah, OK thanks. I had never heard of it.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  If that's really what it is then why does it matter if they won't be made anymore? There must be more to it such as always online DRM service also closing.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Nobody cares that it isn't being made anymore. People are upset that their already purchased devices are being turned into paperweights because they won't maintain the online infrastructure they required to use it. It's wasteful and unfair to the people who bought it and should not be allowed legally.
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
      Yeah I understand that. That wasn't my point. If it was just a "bluetooth remote control" as the GP describes it why does it stop working when some remote service is turned off? It clearly isn't one.

ChildOfChaos 2y ago

This is infuriating. I bought the CarThing for a Christmas present for someone just six months ago. I understand it was no longer supported at the time, but there is no reason why it couldn't still function as a controller, there solution is just to throw it away? Hate the PR speak here "This decision wasn't made lightly, and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged." So what superior listening experience are they committed too exactly? When all they are doing is lowering the experience?

mingus88 2y ago
When their main competitors have been streaming high res, lossless and atmos content for a while now, it’s rough to see them claim they are committed to a superior listening experience with 320kbps ogg being the best they have in 2024. Perhaps pruning projects like this helps them deliver on higher quality streams, which they have been alluding to for years now. Spotify Hifi was announced in 2021.
- phito 2y ago
  The fact is, 99% of people do not care about high quality audio (me included)
- ChildOfChaos 2y ago
  I'm not sure how it would. The Spotify Car thing is just a controller for your phone, it doesn't actually do the streaming of the music, that is still handled by the app on the phone. It's just a kick in the teeth for users that bought into it, I get it's a failed product but that should be the cost of business that they support it at least somewhat, it wouldn't take much, but they are killing it completely.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> I bought the CarThing for a Christmas present for someone just six months ago Depending on your jurisdiction, this may be a short enough window to warrant a refund. Or at the very least a chargeback.

Exx-on 2y ago

Yeah this is absolutely sh*t news to be getting in an email from Spotify... I use my CarThing as dedicated Spotify controller for my desktop PC and they're just straight up making it a paperweight rather than leaving in the current level of support for it so it could still function in the future without the need for constant updates (not that there ever seemed to be any anyway). I hope they think again and reconsider either making it open source as people have suggested or just leaving the current level of functionality. They will loose a lot of followers if they go down this road and potentially also get quite a lot of bad press.

ejj28 2y ago

Really upset by this, I love my Car Thing and the voice control Spotify built into it is second to none - it's quick, always hears me perfectly even with noise in the car, and most importantly, it actually plays what I want it to play. It seems like it's integrated with my music history, so if I ask it to play a song that I listen to a lot but it has a very common name, it'll still get it right - it's like magic. Google Assistant is absolute trash in comparison, even on the (rare) occasion that it finds the right song, it's super slow and half the time it won't even start the music. And good luck asking it to play a song that shares a name with a movie, it'll think you're trying to play the movie. Really disappointed that Spotify is going to stop me from using a piece of hardware that I paid for, and by making me switch to Google Assistant is going to make listening to music in the car hell.

esafak 2y ago
The Spotify app used to have great speech recognition built in. I'm not sure but a furor over its privacy aspects might have played a part in its removal :(
- ejj28 2y ago
  The Car Thing is using the same voice control that used to be in the app, it's the only way you could still use their voice control up to now.

joshl32532 2y ago

And EU is totally fine with this? Should force them to open source it.

rickdeckard 2y ago
They never sold it in EU iirc, only US. So this time, the US needs to handle this on their own...

Nextgrid 2y ago

What's most disgusting is the tone and wording of the e-mail linked in the Reddit post. It reads like they're outright delighted to be breaking your 90-dollar piece of hardware. Not even a fake apology. Tech bros are getting more and more brazen. That email would be fine if they were just discontinuing a feature of their ongoing service - it's disappointing, but you got value out of it while you were paying for it and now we're stopping and won't charge you any further. But this is a stand-alone piece of hardware that they sold without an explicit expiry date, in a product category (car audio) that generally lasts decades (as they are solid-state devices with no moving parts) and now they're outright making it useless 2 years later without any refunds.

JoshGG 2y ago
Agreed it’s obnoxious. It also shows the balance of power between consumers and large businesses internet companies. Best of luck safe travels buh-bye!!
- foundart 2y ago
  See also the recent Sonos app situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40397777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40397777
whycome 2y ago
I would love to have a "real language" version of these corporate press releases. They sold a product, got your money, and now aren't just stopping updates but are actively bricking the device in 6 months. And telling you to throw it out 'safely' too. I wanna sell something that I can just disable a year or so after I've sold it.

rappatic 2y ago

How much work could it possibly be to simply deprecate the software, let alone open-source it? Flipping the switch to break every existing device is frankly malicious.

gs17 2y ago
Some discussion I saw elsewhere speculated that it was to avoid liability since they won't update it anymore, although there's no reason they couldn't open source it as an at-your-own-risk way to keep using it (or at least provide some documentation to the people already jailbreaking them).

peterallport 2y ago

I have never had confidence in Spotify's roadmap.

client4 2y ago

I was always surprised car thing didn't have an aux out, it would have made it so much more useful for older cars.

montag 2y ago
Yes. Absolutely. In many ways, I think Car Thing did the inverse of what I expected it to do. It was mounted on my dash for a total of about 5 minutes.
ryukoposting 2y ago
How old are we talking? I've never owned a car that had an aux input unless I replaced the head unit - and if I replaced the head unit, then I would have Bluetooth too.

dgellow 2y ago

Off topic, but I cannot resist to comment on that line under the headline: > By Chris Welch, a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos So 13 years, that’s around 460 publications per year. That sounds pretty high, you would have to be writing non stop for more than a decade. I know nothing about the tech new industry but is that realistic or just a fantasy?

shmatt 2y ago
I dont know if i would call something like this[1] an article. Taking a bus ad and writing a few sentences about it. He seems great at copy pasting promotional emails he gets I guess [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674048/verizon-will-pay-you-to-switch-networks https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674048/verizon-will-pa...
beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
A lot of "tech news" journalism is just copy pasting a press release. They might also be counting every single article they were on the byline for, but they might not have actually substantially written that much. An example is some review of the "Best Headphones" where the article is huge, but he only wrote a paragraph. I think you might also be underestimating how easy it becomes to just churn out article after article if that's your day-job. You're not writing literature or a longform article in the New Yorker; you're just bashing out 2-4 paragraphs, then rinse and repeat all day.
jawns 2y ago
Former journalist here. I worked at a business dot-com where the writers were expected to churn out at least 5 market briefs a day, and the majority of them did more. I also worked at a daily newspaper where it wasn't uncommon for me to write 8-10 news briefs a day, but they were largely just rehashing police reports or otherwise summarizing content that was already in front of me (as opposed to doing boots-on-the-ground reporting).
rchaud 2y ago
A "publication"in the digital media space includes 200 word blog posts, many of which simply link to other blog posts for the details. In any case, the "website writer" jobs are known for overwork and low pay, so these numbers are par for the course.

edude03 2y ago

I knew this would happen when they had a fire sale on these - but surprised that it won't work at all anymore. Hope they open source the firmware, unlock the boot loader so nerds like us can do something with it

rightbyte 2y ago

How can such an expensive thing be deprecrated in two years? It seems malicious. IoT devices need to come with some sort of "works until" or something.

collinmcnulty 2y ago

Don’t worry, by breaking your device, we’re allowing us to focus on what we want to do.

malfist 2y ago
Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make

AlexandrB 2y ago

> Thank you for being on this journey with us, safe travels. I miss the era when I was a customer paying for a product. Now I'm apparently some kind of traveller that's on a journey with dozens of companies as they try to find local maxima of profit.

neilv 2y ago
One benefit of LLMs is that you can now get copy like that without driving a poor human writer to alcoholism.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bpm140 2y ago
At least they didn’t say it takes courage to brick a perfectly serviceable product. That was last month.

ProjectArcturis 2y ago

I guess Spotify has made the strategic decision not to pursue the consumer car market and instead to cede that space to Sirius. Because this absolutely poisons the well against anyone buying hardware from Spotify again.

SkyPuncher 2y ago
This product was always doomed. Android Auto and CarPlay entirely negate the need for this.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mkeedlinger 2y ago

There are so many examples of this. It's been hard to express and advocate for my severe distrust of proprietary garbage (my choice of words isn't hyperbole in this case) to others around me. But with so much of this race to the bottom, I can't help but wonder: how much will consumers take? I'll admit, my FOSS prefering, DIY leaning use of tech is tedious, but is it worse than dealing with the churn companies force you (and your wallet) to deal with?

rchaud 2y ago
The cassette tape adapter powered by the cigarette lighter is the gold standard of interoperability. Today, most electronics manufacturers have sold off their operations, so we're left with proprietary pap like CarPlay and Android Auto.

neilv 2y ago

"So you're bankrupt and can no longer provide the product you sold? Is this just a legal switcheroo, or is your C-suite team really to the point of personally being out on the street, with their pockets turned out empty?" "Oh, goodness, no! We're doing great! But we already took that money, and we know our customers are too weak and airheaded to put law enforcement or regulators on us, nor to sue us for more than a free Big Mac coupon settlement received only after several years of foot-dragging. And most all of you pathetic worms will keep paying us money. If you can't hear us laughing at you, that's because you're plugged into one of our other products like a mindless zombie."

ryanmcbride 2y ago

apparently they're rootable so maybe some hobbyists will still be able to squeeze something cool out of the hardware (unlikely) but this is so malicious. https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/ https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/

ryukoposting 2y ago

It would be easy to flip a couple GitHub repos to "public" and call it a day. It would be easy to wipe proprietary IP from the latest version, shove whatever's left in a ZIP file, and upload it somewhere online. It would be easy to do literally nothing except publish instructions on how to wipe the flash. That alone would be enough to allow some clever people online to get a normal Android installation onto these things. Somehow, all of these options are too much for Spotify to stomach. Shameful. Honestly, I forgot Car Thing even existed. I hardly remembered it at all. Given how my car is over 20 years old and I make extensive use of Spotify while driving, I imagine I was probably the target audience for Car Thing. Makes me wonder if Car Thing's biggest problem was marketing.

gs17 2y ago
I had just remembered it existed recently, glad I didn't look into getting one. My assumption was that it had lost support but would work indefinitely, how naive of me.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  It's a nice well-built device, running Android and a stripped-down Chromium Engine to render the Spotify webapp. Which makes it even more puzzling that they can't keep it running...
  - roland35 2y ago
    This happened a few times at Meta (remember the Portal?!). I think leadership just wants a clean break and doesn't want any support calls, liability, brand relationship to the device, etc etc
    - ryukoposting 2y ago
      If they don't want support calls, liability, or brand association, then they shouldn't have made the fucking product in the first place! I know this is HN and I'm preaching to the choir, but it's infuriating.

skhameneh 2y ago

I don't have one of these and and this irritates me as a Spotify subscriber. The least they could do is credit accounts with Spotify Premium, for those that bought these devices.

pjerem 2y ago
If they had done this, like, giving 1 year of subscription for free, that would have been an ethical and environmental scandal but the fact they did nothing is just insulting their customers. I'm nearly a day one subscriber but i'm currently exploring my options to leave.
- solarkraft 2y ago
  Tidal is alright. They're mostly fine with doing their job instead of bombarding you with new pointless crap all the time. They haven't made a car thing. They aren't doing podcasts. They aren't reshuffling their UI every week. Basically they're (mostly, could be even better) just shutting the fuck up and it's definitely nicer than using Spotify was.
  - skhameneh 2y ago
    I subscribed to Tidal relatively early and could tell the difference in audio quality with some songs. I stuck with Spotify because I couldn't justify paying more for a smaller catalog. I've been slowly frustrated with the changes Spotify keeps introducing... breaking my "Starred" songs by replacing it with "Liked" songs, tampering with song shuffle, and routinely switching me to "Autoplay". Some of the curated playlists have gone down in quality as well, they'll start off great and halfway through I'm wondering why the playlist changed so drastically. I can't say for certain the discontinuation of Car Thing will have me end my subscription, but I will say this is the start of a wake up call for how Spotify treats their most loyal customers.
    - pjerem 2y ago
      You should check back their pricing. What you said was true some years ago but now that Spotify increased their prices multiple times, the pricing is the same (in Europe, the family plan is even 1€ cheaper).

djc6 2y ago

Here is a poll on Spotify's community asking to open source it - already almost 800 "signatures": https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Car-Thing-Developer-SDK-for-Spotify-Car-Thing/idi-p/5437643 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Car-Thing-Develo...

Wingman4l7 2y ago
There was a poll with probably more signatures than that for adding "swipe to queue" to Android that they sat on for years until they finally implemented it.

aworks 2y ago

I retired my Car Thing three months after purchasing. All of the functionality was better on my phone with the exception of a large, tactile button. I didn't expect any refund here but it does remind me of when Apple bought lala, the music streamer, for their track upload technology to be added to iTunes. I eventually got a check from Apple refunding the $25 I paid that had enabled the ability to play tracks more than once, in this case, 100 of them. I wasn't expecting anything but it was a nice gesture. The Spotify experience continues to remind me I miss lala (and rdio).

IronWolve 2y ago

Any state AG want a class action lawsuit, bricking a device I use seems like a crime of some kind.

dwb 2y ago

[flagged]

matt3210 2y ago

They cant open source it, I think, because it's filled with stolen open source code.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

efilife 2y ago

> We're discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings. 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. But we just don't care. And what are you going to do?

rickdeckard 2y ago

I frankly don't get what's so complicated for Spotify to keep this thing running as-is. CarThing is a web application running on Chrome within a stripped-down Android core with 512MB RAM. What happened, vulnerabilities which are not disclosed now? I got one on sale a year ago, it's a really well-built nice device, would be great if they open-source the missing parts of it (the GPL'd kernel was released some time ago, but it's not the latest I think)

binkethy 2y ago

I don't know why folks would grow a dependency upon a middleman between you and your music collection. What's wrong with a usb pen drive full of tunes? You get to keep the files!

hulitu 2y ago
> What's wrong with a usb pen drive full of tunes? I don't know about you, but my whole life is in the cloud these days. /s
s1gsegv 2y ago
They provide a really pleasant service in return: new music discovery I may not keep the files, but if I left Spotify I’m still left with a list of thousands of songs I enjoy and almost certainly wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

talldayo 2y ago

Remind me why I shouldn't be able to put my own version of Android on this again?

contravariant 2y ago
You might incorrectly assume you owned the device you bought.

meindnoch 2y ago

[flagged]

rhplus 2y ago

Not surprising, given the awkward position the product was in, targeting customers who don’t already have CarPlay or Android Auto (lower end of the market), but are also willing to pay for Spotify Premium and a good smartphone data plan (higher end of the market).

infecto 2y ago
I think its less about high-end/low-end, after all carplay did not hit Toyota until around 2018. Its simply that you still need a phone to use the device, might as well connect your phone to your cars audio and use your phones screen.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  But the real question is why brick it? What requires so much maintenance?
  - jasonjayr 2y ago
    A wild guess? Maybe enhanced DRM so the audio path can't be MITM'd, and the digital audio data captured?
  - sbarre 2y ago
    Not that it's an acceptable reason, but could they be paying some kind of ongoing license for a codec or some other licensed software on the thing?
  - rhplus 2y ago
    DevOps, monitoring, support costs, ongoing security burden. You can’t just ship a device specific API anymore and call it done. Those services will have at least monthly security updates, plus all the shimming and API back-compact work that has to be done as the backend Spotify services change.
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      I understand, at the same time the api shouldn't be too different to what is used by other devices (otherwise they would be just shooting themselves in the foot)

mkopec 2y ago

I firmly believe that permanent key fusing to lock bootloaders should be outlawed. At the very least the keys (and schematics) should be released once the device reaches EOL. Otherwise we're just manufacturing e-waste.

tedivm 2y ago
Agreed. We really need some sort of regulation that prevents companies from bricking devices they sold. It's just so unethical, and wasteful, to put these devices out there and then just turn them into trash.
Aardwolf 2y ago
Or just stop this nonsense of needing updates to keep things working, which then allows updates that break things. Have proper standards how music is transmitted. Have devices support those standards. Have those standards be long-running.
- contravariant 2y ago
  Doesn't sound like its an update that bricks them, thought the article is a bit confusing on that point. Sounds to me like they broke the API (or just blocked this particular User-Agent)
- talldayo 2y ago
  Situation: there are now 15 competing music streaming standards.
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    FM and AM were only 2 and were long running
  - Galatians4_16 2y ago
    EU legislation on power chords gave us micro-USB phones, when USB-C could have been a better option, but a real solution would be let consumers decide inputs/outputs.

whstl 2y ago

"If purchase isn't ownership, then stealing remotely-brickable devices isn't theft."

Galatians4_16 2y ago
*cracking Stealing devices is still theft.

392 2y ago

I was suspicious when they advertised on sale for $30 last year. Maybe Lina Khan will peruse the emails that lead to that clearance. Though it's no surprise Spotify failed at hardware given their general software competency. Broke the Chromecast app for years after the big mobile redesign. Not sure how it's possible to have such bugs in an app that shows three buttons, a progress bar, and a picture, but 2,000 engineers will find a way. Liked page on the phone app doesn't even load with bad service, which is like your umbrella not opening in the rain. Anyone know of alternatives, even alternative clients?

internet101010 2y ago

Would be nice if they just open sourced it but that would require Spotify to allow playback control outside of their terrible, janky apps.

sbarre 2y ago

What I always find so disappointing in these scenarios is when companies are too chicken-shit to just give a reasonable honest explanation to requests like open sourcing this to avoid them all turning into e-waste. It feels like adding insult to injury for everyone who put faith in the product/company. I've been a long-time premium subscriber of Spotify, but I've already decided I will never buy a hardware device from them (even before Car Thing came out) or do something like pay annually for their services, because I don't trust their commitment to anything for more than 30 days at a time at this point.

micromacrofoot 2y ago
The honest explanation is that they lost so much money on the idea that they grimace at spending even another hour of developer time on them. They don't care about waste, they don't care about the consumers, all decisions boil down to profit.
SkyPuncher 2y ago
I agree. It’s so obvious that they’re trying way too hard to _not_ be the thing that I’m paying them for (music streaming).

jensenbox 2y ago

Spotify: the new Sonos

ornornor 2y ago
Didn’t even sonos end up walking that decision back and let people keep the devices and get the rebate rather than bricking the traded in speakers? But only after public outcry.

Aeolun 2y ago

I think at some point we’re going to have to start regulating this. You can’t just sell people some piece of hardware and then make it unuseable a few years later.

soco 2y ago
s/think/hope/g

dagurp 2y ago

Unrelated but what's going on with the cookie prompt on this site. There's a bunch of cookies used for advertising that you cannot say no to. I can't imagine that this is allowed.

Nextgrid 2y ago
Well this is about as legal as bricking (aka vandalizing) a device people paid money for, but hey when you're a company breaking the law/regulations is just normal business practice.

boesboes 2y ago

Spotify, another great example of the VC funded tech cancers that came to disrupt and turned out to be even worse then what came before… We deserve this shit, because we keep buying into it

snapcaster 2y ago

What are the actual practical nuts and bolts problems with making bricking devices like this illegal? Someone in comments mentioned licensing contracts and things that might require them to but that seems resolvable. This seems so anti-social, anti-environment and not even benefitting them selfishly. Just a waste

ornornor 2y ago
I suspect it’s just a matter of it being easier to tell people to bin it than going through the hurdles of opening it (legal, drm, engineering, getting a budget, publishing instructions…) Plus doing anything at all beyond pulling the plug sounds like it will cost some amount of money (no matter how little) so someone somewhere will have to convince bean counters to allocate a budget for and capacity it.

squarefoot 2y ago

Incidentally, I just installed Navidrome on my Alpine Linux server for test, and it's currently scanning all my local music library. The heck if I'm going to depend to any proprietary device/format that is going to become a brick, then e-waste, as soon as the company behind it makes it obsolete. Happened a million times and will happen again. https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ Yes, I would totally push for legislation forcing manufacturers to unlock bootloaders and release tech info when they stop selling devices, so that hardware can be repurposed; landfills are already full of perfectly functioning stuff that could be put again in operation if manufacturers weren't so stubbornly hostile to anything Open Source.

candiddevmike 2y ago
Are you going to hook speakers up to your server? I'm planning my Google Home replacement strategy for if/when they add a subscription like Alexa. I want an offline whole home sound system with independent room controls, seems like Navidrome might work...
- squarefoot 2y ago
  No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate. https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song. https://www.musicpd.org/ https://www.musicpd.org/

rkangel 2y ago

This largely feels like a failure of consumer protection. Perhaps my understanding of the legal situation is wrong but as a UK resident - regardless of additional warranties provided or not provided by the vendor - products should work for a "reasonable" length of time and you are entitled to replacement or refund if they fail. Obviously I would expect an electronic device like this to last more than 2 years, so if Spotify is going to cause it to stop working then they'd have to refund me. Having to do that for their entire customer base would probably result in some different decision making! Obviously this product was only sold in the US (AFAIK), which has much less in the way of consumer protection, which allows for this crappy treatment of consumers.

Raed667 2y ago

Spotify stopped making Car Thing around July 2022 [0] But the device has also been jailbroken for a couple of years now [1] It even runs Debian [2] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280357/spotify-stops-manufacturing-car-thing-q2-2022-earnings https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280357/spotify-stops-ma... [1] https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineering/issues/15 https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer... [2] https://github.com/bishopdynamics/superbird-debian-kiosk https://github.com/bishopdynamics/superbird-debian-kiosk

micromacrofoot 2y ago

It seemed clear they were at end of life when they started selling them for next to nothing last year. We really need legislation to unlock devices like this when they reach EOL, the hardware here is very simple and could easily be reused.

yareal 2y ago

It's surprising to me that people see examples like this and somehow still think, "well, it's one bad apple. One bad decision from one company" rather than a systematic problem with incentive structures. Capitalism, and particularly capitalism that emphasizes profit, warps incentives away from building things for people. And we have other functioning models! Open source is about as close to anarchist theory in practice as there is, for example. "Wellbeing for all" isn't some pipe dream we could never achieve, FOSS is built on the principle of "I'll build it, use it if you like. Help me if you can."

phkahler 2y ago

When IoT means InOperable Technology! :-)

somnic 2y ago

[flagged]

yareal 2y ago
Blaming the victim of a con is just intellectual elitism. Everyone, literally everyone is vulnerable to a con that's obvious to someone else. Sure, tech cons are more obvious to us technical folk, but we have our own blind spots in other industries we are vulnerable to. (I cannot be as sure I I'm not being conned by construction, automotive, medical, or education industries, for example.) Continue to hold the con artists in contempt, not their victims.

tiborsaas 2y ago

What the hell are they discontinuing? The hardware won't change. Streaming MP3 shouldn't be rocket science that requires 50 engineers. Even if the internal API-s change, can't they just create mappings the devices need? They are not even willing to put that effort in. So sad to see software companies treat hardware as a failed hobby project then flat out say customers to bring their devices to an e-waste dump like they do in their FAQ.

ornornor 2y ago
> 50 engineers 50?? Try 1600+ (from https://engineering.atspotify.com/opensource/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/opensource/)
- tiborsaas 2y ago
  I was referring to the team to maintain Car Thing :)

wink 2y ago

At first I thought it was an Onion headline, as if "Car Thing" was a real name...

polotics 2y ago

Are there not already "right to repair" laws that clearly give the user of a legally purchased device that stops functioning because of a defect (even if the defect's origin is that Spotify has defectuous management) the right to repair that device? I do not see how the right to repair does not mandate that Spotify publish any and all keys and documentation to allow the purchased devices to be repaired. RIGHT?

big_dinghy 2y ago

Spotify only offers chat support via its website. Attempts to receive a refund have been met with request for customer location and receipt. Support mentions the backend team will reach out by email, "after a few hours." No followup has been sent after 24 hours and requests for update. As a decade-long Spotify premium user, I am disappointed by this poor experience and wastefulness. Over the course of using their product, there have been few new, impactful features. I do not believe the company can offer a compelling service at their pricepoint and will seek alternatives.

tmpz22 2y ago
> Over the course of using their product, there have been few new, impactful features. What new features do you want for a music player? Better audio quality? More discovery features? Lower memory usage? More responsive UI?
- haiku2077 2y ago
  I switched to Apple Music because of Apple Music Classical (browsing and curation of classical music is very different from popular music.) I'd love a similar feature set for Jazz.
  - wjnc 2y ago
    Concertmaster is available as a paid companion app to Spotify. (For others interested in classical.)
- sublinear 2y ago
  > What new features do you want for a music player? Better audio quality? More discovery features? Lower memory usage? More responsive UI? You just perfectly highlighted the business mindset that never fixes a goddamn thing they rushed out.
- vsnf 2y ago
  I can think of ten thousand things I'd like the Spotify player to do. - First of all, stop changing the layout every goddamn day - Stop pushing podcasts - Better 'ignore' functionality so I can listen to something without it influencing my recommendations. I know Private Mode exists but it's clumsy and all-or-nothing. I want it to be more granular and available on an as-needed basis. - Support for player cursors, which is like 'queue', but with the ability to tell Spotify to 'resume playing from this point in the playlist'. Maybe even expand this, and add multiple simultaneous cursor support, allowing for on-demand blackout zones or something. - Bring back the 30 second press-to-hold song preview. Removing this feature was a crime. "low usage" my ass, so what? Keep it in, you scoundrels, even the SDK still supports it. - Support for song start/end offsets. This is the #1 most requested feature on their feedback forums, has been open for 10 years, and they only ever occasionally chime in to say "we hear you, but not right now". If the issue is legal, just say so and stop leading us all on. - Allow me to re-order my Liked Songs. - Do what Apple Music did and require artists upload lyrics. Partnering with Genius was a dumb move. Genius is inconsistently available, and more often than not, just straight up incorrect. There are so many more. Their UI is just barely on the right side of acceptable and not one inch further than that. I stay on Spotify because their music discovery is really excellent, I look forward to the new recommendations from Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and I think the Spotify Wrapped is a lot of fun every year. But as a music player, it is deficient to the highest degree.

mvdtnz 2y ago

How could they discontinue this product due to low demand when it was released to market in February 2022 and discontinued in July 2022? It wasn't on shelves long enough to assess demand.

evanb 2y ago
What surprised me in the article was > “The goal of our Car Thing exploration in the U.S. was to learn more about how people listen in the car,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. The goal was not to build a consumer device for users who actually wanted to use the damned thing! So it apparently was never about demand to begin with, it was a learning exercise. Apparently the RLHF was so disastrous it only took 5 months to train this feature out of Spotify's business plan.
wildzzz 2y ago
They were probably selling it at a loss or at least not enough profit to have it stand on its own. It only works with Spotify premium accounts so they could easily see who bought one and upgraded their account to use it. I'm guessing they just saw mostly existing premium users buying them and definitely not enough of them. There are plenty of ways to get audio off your phone and into your non-bluetooth car stereo for less money so it's more of a luxury than a necessity. Who is this product for? Someone that is willing to spend money on a relatively expensive Bluetooth receiver and a premium account and someone that is driving an older car (possibly 8-10 years old at least) that lacks bluetooth. Frugal car owners might not have a lot of overlap with those with the disposable income for premium audio equipment and music subscriptions. For $100, you can pretty much buy a new stereo that has Bluetooth and you don't need Spotify premium to use it. Even just $15 on Amazon will buy you a Bluetooth receiver that works with your car's aux jack or a cassette adapter. It's a neat device and definitely filled a niche for some people but it wasn't going to convert many users to a paid account.

throwaway4220 2y ago

It’s ok because they “deeply appreciate” our “support” (money). What the hell does this even mean? I was happy with this on my old civic. Now I’m switching to tidal.

Always42 2y ago

Rant: I have all my shitify notifications turned off in the app. But, I still get those obnoxious "concert near you" banner that pushes the display down (changing all the button locations that I have memorized) and doesn't disapeered ubtil you click the tiny x. It drives me bonkers. I pay for family and am considering moving everyone to deezer out of spite

ozozozd 2y ago
Fair concern. You could be driving. And given the performance of their car UI and integration with car play, this banner could cause an accident.
deleted 2y ago
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joshstrange 2y ago

I think it’s about time for me to give Apple Music another try. I don’t care for the direction that Spotify has been going over the last few years, especially with podcasts and audiobooks in the app. Spotify is a blight on the podcast ecosystem. I really don’t like Spotify‘s attitude towards Apple and cutting off their own nose to spite their face (See AirPlay 2) and the only reason I was still using Spotify is some of the UI/UX, which has gotten worse and worse over the last few years. At one point I cared about the ability to integrate nicely with my Amazon echoes (it was much nicer than the Apple Music integration at the time) which I’ve been replacing with Sonos speakers anyways, which support AirPlay 2.

elintknower 2y ago

This was a stupid product to begin with. It solved a non-existent problem and had to... pair to your phone to work anyways which begs the question... why not literally just use the spotify app on your phone?

wildzzz 2y ago
It has aux output which is the only way to input audio for many older cars. Your phone automatically connects via Bluetooth and you have a convenient display on the dash you can use to see what's playing and change the song. Not too many smartphones still have headphones jacks and having to connect your phone each time in the car with a USB to aux adapter cable is a little annoying. It also flexes all of the features Bluetooth audio supports (like album art) that even cars with Bluetooth don't always do. I almost bought one for my car but instead just cobbled together something using an FM modulator that was near useless in my area and a tape deck adapter. Works great and I have some basic playback controls in easy reach although a screen would have been nice. Buying an aftermarket stereo with Bluetooth would have been pretty expensive with the massive trim kit and the other crap I'd have to buy to keep my steering wheel controls working. I've also seen people using it on home stereos systems as well. It's a perfect device to fill a specific niche for when you want Bluetooth audio but your existing audio system only has aux input or a tape deck.

charles_f 2y ago

My favorite part of the announcement > This decision wasn't made lightly "We thought long and hard about the money we make and the stuff we sold our customers, and frowned when we realized we prefer the former" > and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged That is: unless you are using car thing, in which case your experience will become much worse

pjfin123 2y ago

Someone should jailbreak it and publish a method for installing Linux on the hardware

jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
It's an android device. There are already guides online for customising it using ADB. (mostly to get it to work without a premium account)

friend_and_foe 2y ago

Friendly reminder that if a you agree to a terms of service for a hardware device you don't own it. It's one thing for software to be a service. Hardware? No thanks. I will never, ever "buy "something still controlled by the manufacturer after I take it home, and I discourage everyone from doing so.

csiegert 2y ago

Mail the device to Spotify’s headquarters. Better, a Swedish artist should build a memorial made of these devices in front of Spotify’s headquarters.