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Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

support.spotify.com

51–60 of 240 posts

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#51
"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."

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#53
post #37

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…

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#54

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.

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).

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#55
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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#56

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 thi…

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#57

> 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.

One benefit of LLMs is that you can now get copy like that without driving a poor human writer to alcoholism.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#58
post #8

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 fo…

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

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#60
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think a PM made this decision? Not at least someone at a VP or higher level?

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.

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