Otherwise we're just manufacturing e-waste.
> 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.
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.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280357/spotify-stops-ma...
[1] https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer...
[2] https://github.com/bishopdynamics/superbird-debian-kiosk
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.?
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.
> 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?
It drives me bonkers.
I pay for family and am considering moving everyone to deezer out of spite
The least they could do is credit accounts with Spotify Premium, for those that bought these devices.
Should force them to open source it.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Car-Thing-Develo...
We really need legislation to unlock devices like this when they reach EOL, the hardware here is very simple and could easily be reused.
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.
What the hell does this even mean?
I was happy with this on my old civic. Now I’m switching to tidal.
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.
But we just don't care. And what are you going to do?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
> 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
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?
EDIT: don't waste your time, PayPal auto-denied it because it's been >180 days since the transaction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"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."
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.
What's wrong with a usb pen drive full of tunes?
You get to keep the files!
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?
We deserve this shit, because we keep buying into it
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."
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.
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.