Spotify killed off its Car Thing when it didn’t have to, but the community came to save the day.
Bit by Bit is a weekly column focusing on technical advances each and every week across multiple spaces. My name is Adam Conway, and I’ve been covering tech and following the cutting-edge for a decade. If there’s something you’re interested in and would like to see covered, you can reach out to me at adam@xda-developers.com.
Old tech doesn’t have to go to waste, and I think the best example of that being put into practice is Spotify’s Car Thing. It’s a product that was sold in 2022 for a short period, before being discontinued with a promise to be entirely killed off by December 9th, 2024. For the uninitiated: it’s basically a little Android Auto device, except it only runs Spotify, and you can use it to control your music in a car on a 4-inch touchscreen with a single knob.
Whether or not you feel the device has any sort of utility isn’t the point; it was a $100 device that some people bought, and it was made obsolete intentionally when paying customers had purchased these devices. In essence, Spotify had manufactured e-waste, but users took things into their own hands. The Spotify Car Thing has a booming custom development community, and it proves that old tech doesn’t have to go to waste. Spotify’s Car Thing specs are terrible It was made open-source a couple of years ago
Spotify’s Car Thing has terrible specs, powered by an Amlogic S905D2 with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali G31 MP2 GPU.
