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Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

support.spotify.com

81–90 of 240 posts

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#81
> 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?

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#82
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)

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#83
post #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.

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...

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#85

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.

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...

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#87

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.

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#88
post #34

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

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#89

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.

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.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#90
post #87

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.

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.

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.
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