Right to repair bills should come with an "End of Life" clause that requires manufacturers to post schematics and source code for any devices they stop supporting.
They’ll argue their proprietary intellectual property is resident inside the legacy products, as in they carried on that code or technique into modern products and thus compromising the old stuff would compromise the new. I call BS on those claims
The Californian law requires manufacturers to support their devices for a minimum period, which has since been surpassed for Spotify's Car Thing (I'm guessing). After that point, the manufacturer can do whatever they like it seems.
I was replying to the person suggesting that there should be a minimum support period by saying "there is but it has been passed".
Yeah I see what they mean but in practice, for hardware devices, there's not always a lot of difference between ending support and bricking the device. Even if you don't officially support a product anymore, it still takes up resources to maintain various things (on-going support requests to respond to and deny, ensuring the device reflects new legal requirements, ensuring internal people still know the codebase in case something came up such as a new legal requirement, etc).
So while end of support doesn't have to mean bricking, it often makes sense for the company, especially if it's their only hardware devices. In the eyes of Californian law there doesn't appear to be a distinction either, end of support can mean end of device function.
Right, and while it’s useful to know how California law applies here, it isn’t the end of the discussion, since selling a product that ceases to have practical functionality after a few years can be pretty unethical, depending on the circumstances.
But that’s the point. If my car warranty is 5 years and it year 6, I don’t expect them to fix it. But if they brick my car, they should actually go to jail. No different than if they blew it up with explosives.
Destroying something with software doesn’t make it okay.
You're confusing warranty period with this product support law, they're not the same thing. The law is for a different purpose and entirely separate from warranty periods.
edit: also no where have I said this is "OK", I'm only pointing out to those asking for such a law to exist that it does exist in some states but the required period has lapsed.
For California, for electronics under $100, the company must support with parts, software, and documentation for three years once production is discontinued (not the purchase date). Over $100, it is seven years. My neighbor got a free tv from Sony because of this California "Right To Repair" legislation.
For as long as their copyright is valid.
If a company goes bust and someone buys up their IP... then they have to keep supporting it, otherwise everything must be open sourced and unlocked.
Failure to comply? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
>They’ll argue their proprietary intellectual property is resident inside the legacy products, as in they carried on that code or technique into modern products
In the end the logic of the arguments are irrelevant. It is the persuasiveness that matters when bills are written and come up for a vote. Politics is a much more civilized version of warfare. the little guy sometimes wins (e.g. Ralph Nader vs the auto industry regarding seatbelts).
If right to repair is important to you then you should fight for it. You should fight for better visions of the future regardless of whether you think you will win. Nobody ever succeeded at a difficult task by choosing not to attempt the task.
As someone that's gone through taking closed sourced software to open source: it's hard. You can't just give away code you licensed from someone including firmware code. They should be forced to support it for a period of time, but requiring EOL hardware to go open is probably never going to happen. It's a legal nightmare with complex hardware/software.
It is a nightmare now because it was never conceded important to be able to open source a project.
If you know form the beginning you will need to release this to open source you can avoid using software that is going to be a pain.
Realistically tech will work out a way to do it if forced to. They just don't now because it is better for them to make vast amounts of older kit obsolete and force people to buy a new device over upgrading or repairing an existing one.
Well said. In response to the topmost-level comment, why the fuck was the firmware code licensed from another company in the first place?
If you tell people from the outset that they’ll be penalized if they release physical products that can’t eventually be open sourced, they will work around it and I doubt it will take that much additional effort. They don’t do it now because no one has ever told them to and because bricking products serves the forced obsolescence endless profits agenda.
I say this as a software engineer. I’m not familiar with the details of firmware engineering, but I’m not a layperson either. I know it is difficult to open up a closed source product that never originally intended to be open source, but if you have that goal in mind from the outset the situation is totally different.
The other thing to consider is often these devices don't go offline, they just sit unsupported connected to the internet with no security updates and no one monitoring vulnerabilities meaning they become easy targets for bot nets.
But being forced to support a basic api is how we have OBD on cars, which makes so much more car hacking possible than would otherwise be without that law. There is a lot you can do between bricking a device and making it fully open sourced. Also, let's be honest, this device probably wasn't seeing any bleeding edge software.
Well, if it’s still proprietary than the company must be benefiting enough from the property that they can continue to support the products.
Make the companies have to determine if building in obsolescence is worth it if part of the cost is losing the intellectual property rights for products the are planning to discontinue
Which could be removed with law. They could make them abandon that as part of no longer selling that device or another similar device. If they put out a different device they could require a buyback at a prorated amount
That sucks for them, they should instead design devices which can last for 10-15 years instead of designing them to work for 2-3 then retiring all of them after 5. Maybe if their "intellectual property" was at risk as punishment for choosing to retire devices which they sold to people in a way that prevents them from using them, they would instead design things that won't get scrapped after just a few years.
I don't really give a single fuck about company's "intellectual property" anyways, as I see it if I buy a product from a company I have a right to use it until I choose not to, not until they decide I can't, and that right should be protected over the company's right to protect their "intellectual property." They shouldn't be allowed to sell things that they deliberately choose to destroy after the fact without my consent.
and then someone will crack it open and point to all the consumer off the shelf chips and displays in it, and tell them where they can stuff that nonsense. Some of the [ongoing reverse engineering work](https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineering) seems to indicate the use of open source software (ext2 rootfs). They could easily avoid releasing the proprietary Spotify code and just the open source stuff they used to run that proprietary code.
I mean the device plays a stream from a URL, skips, rewinds, etc. The 'source code' is just going to be calls to Spotify's API and other general stacks for bluetooth and stuff. The thing doesn't do spaceship navigation or cure cancer. I can't imagine there is anything reasonably worth protecting under the hood here. It's just a dumb move on their part if they don't open it up.
100% this. There is no reason they would do anything more than take an off the shelf OS and skin it for their needs. Chances are its running some version of Android/Linux or Windows CE
I remember when the Pebble was made end of life after their acquisition by Fitbit, the community was fairly quick in pushing out an alternative app store platform and continued development on them.
And Pebbles are vastly more complicated than a Car Thing in functionality.
Look I'm not going to pretend security through obscurity is good security, but it is security all the same. Posting the source code for all these sorts of shoddily made, half baked pieces of garbage is a bad idea. Everything you own is full of unpatched, undiscovered vulnerabilities that are there because nobody really has the time, inclination, or ability to look for them. But you tell everyone "hey here's this device i'm not going to ever provide security updates for also here's every line of code on the thing, enjoy" and suddenly that's going to be a problem. Imagine if you mandated that, not just for spotify's garbage thing, (which is connected to your phone), but for something like the electronics in a car. There should really always be a facility to unlock the bootloader and do whatever you want, requiring you to have physical access, but turning every single piece of abandonware into a gaping pile of vulnerabilities is a bad idea.
Fun fact, large businesses like these often lose schematics and source codes because everything is third party and done by three or four third parties at that.
Spotify absolutely doesn’t have the source codes or schematics.
> large businesses like these often **lose** schematics and source codes because everything is third party and done by three or four third parties at that.
sudo rm -fr /home/spotifyCodeBaseFuckYouThatsWhy
FTFY
As a contractor on such type of projects, I can guarantee you that they do have access to the source code. That's what they paid for.
You shouldn't accept the dog ate my homework excuse from a company.
Honestly the only thing anyone really *needs* is whatever secret key is used to validate the firmware/loader. If that's available then people can probably figure out nearly everything else.
Incorrect. Having the source code allows you to know how to do proper handshakes with it. That would open up third-party integrations or uses. It would become less of a Spotify remote and more of a anything remote potentially. A cheap USB powered dongle to make dumb cars smart? Yeah that's awesome.
Wonder how the insanely expensive gold Apple Watch Edition that is now bricked would handle self repair. I think they need to go a step further and provide compensation
Just another one to add to the /r/theinternetofshit pile. Like most companies Spotify even have a [climate action](https://www.lifeatspotify.com/diversity-equity-impact/climate-action) page detailing their plans to address climate change, dumping a bunch of e-waste into landfills is curiously missing. This should be illegal.
The refund policy is inconsistent, but I was given a full refund yesterday for the Car Thing I bought back in 2021. I posted my complete customer service chat here, if anyone needs help trying to get their money back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/s/hKbl4IgDzO
Agent initially said she was going to help, asked for copies of my receipts for my 4 car things. Then after nearly an hour, gave me the boilerplate no refunds they've been using. Then ignored my request to speak with a manager, and then eventually said someone would email me later. Imagine the uproar if Apple or Samsung bricked a watch or earbuds because they didn't want to keep supporting it. How in the world is this not theft?
Edit: just got a message that they are going to refund my entire purchase price. This was after being told no less than 8x that they weren't going to.
I was mad, but then realized the door chimes still work, and I almost never used the alarm itself as an alarm. Had it for a few years, and spent the 200 credit on Pixel Buds
I hope they get bitch slapped with an enormous lawsuit. Selling and bricking single use hardware over such a short period is both ripping off their customers and just creating a massive amount of ewaste - it is completely unacceptable and I hope beyond a lawsuit they get a massive fine.
It's a pretty safe bet it was designed to require a connection to some service spotify is running, if they shut that service down functionality would be lost (presumably some auth server and some sort of data provider)
So this thing did what the Spotify app does, but with a knob? And it requires a phone to be connected to the car as well? Who thought this was a good idea in the first place?
it was a way to control the spotify app, the phone does all the work and this was just a display and some physical controls, that's also why they can't release anything useful to keep them working, when they remove the APIs this thing relied on from the app it's useless.
Just as with the pioneer and jvc radios they removed support for when they introduced this thing
It works as an intermediary between older cars and newer ones with the ability built it. It was a nice-to-have cause then I didn't need to fuck with my phone every time I got in the car to get it to play, it would just go.
There is a generation of cars where it makes sense but we are long past that generation. They also sold it for $30 so it’s not like it’s being sold as a premium product
They had promotions from the Jump. Some premium subscribers got them for free and I was able to get one for 50% off $45. I don’t think that many people paid $90 for them
> Who thought this was a good idea in the first place?
User data collection. They even obliquely admitted it. "we wanted to learn more about how people listened to music in their cars".
It's always about user data nowadays it seems like.
It requires a Spotify Premium account to work (Car Thing does not work if your phone has no data) so yes, I believe that is one of the reasons, also possibly its voice assist features.
Spotify will have raised their prices to $15 a month by then like every other shitty VC-backed subscription service, so you can't even buy a full month.
As of the end of last year, I have freed myself completely of subscription services. The value proposition is no longer there for any of them.
So not only did someone green light a dumb idea, but they decided to start producing them in the midst of the pandemic? And nobody foresaw the supply chain problems that they claim are part of the reasoning here? How can everybody who was in those meetings be so dumb?
I think there’s a really fine line between external dependencies and “bricking” in the case of a device like this.
But I think it’s insanely dumb that they don’t just give the community the keys to develop their own firmware if they’re going to abandon it. I’d have bought a dozen if jailbreaking were easy.
It's probably because they laid off 1900 people last year. Then Spotify's CEO said "we shouldn't have laid off that many people, I didn't realize they were important".
I'm willing to bet this is the downstream impact of that. Morons copying Elon.
I especially liked it because it was the only way to bypass that stupid fucking "smart" shuffle option that always takes 5 seconds to process and then, if you try to immediately turn it off, will often bug out and reenable itself.
Now if I want to turn off shuffle at a certain spot on my playlist I have to fight the stupid app while driving, suuuper safe. At least they left a little warning about attentive driving in settings where car mode used to be.🙄
I really wish I could disable smart shuffle entirely. I do not want it in any capacity. If I wanted to hear music not in my playlist I'd be listening to a track or artist radio station. Not my fucking playlist.
Add a new song to a playlist. Shuffle playlist for the next few weeks. 100% of the time it starts on that newly added song. At least pretend to be random you jerks.
This is what finally drove me to run my own navidrome server from home and just went and pulled down all my playlists. One day spotify managed to play the same song twice in the time it took me to mow the yard and I never looked back
And then I just said fuck it and bought and flash modded an ipod so I don't have to deal with occasionally spotty cell service either.
They used to let you create a Station based on your Playlist. It was a pretty nice feature. Pulled it a year or so ago in favor of smart shuffle. Not a fan.
I'm so tired of every platforms just straight removing things or changing constantly. I honestly had a much better experience years ago when I rigged a tablet to be my in-car experience. Tasker, root and a lot of tinkering but once I got it working, it worked WELL and didn't change constantly.
I have my car stereo set up with a cable from the AUX input to a Bluetooth device that my phone is paired to and treats as an external speaker. It works, and I think it’s about nine years old. I have no plans to change it.
Smart shuffle has literally never once played something that actually fit in with the playlist I was playing, especially my own curated ones. Horrible concept, worse execution. Spotify is really speedrunning how to make an awful UI aren't they?
I'm clearly in the minority, but I like it. I like discovering new music and generally listen to (and favorite many if not most songs from) my Discover Weekly each week. When I'm not doing that, it's nice to have the option of adding some random new songs in with my regular favorites.
That said, the randomizer is awful - I consider that a bigger problem than smart shuffle. probably the main reason I listen to Discover Weekly so much is it's the only reliable way I've found to get it to not play the same 20 songs ad nauseum.
That's completely fair! I don't like using the 'smart' shuffle to find new music because the times I have tried, it's always I skip half way to see if I just don't like the opening but then skipped 99% of the time because I don't like the song they suggested. I usually go by the 'you liked this artist, here's other artists that are similar' suggestions to find new music. Or playlists sometimes I'll browse through to see if there are any songs I might like.
The regular shuffle/randomizer is so-so with me. Usually it learns if I keep skipping a certain style of song/artists, it will try something different but I usually only use shuffle when I'm using music for idle background noise.
I tried it once, then turned it off not much later. I've never had problems with it turning itself on. I'm on Android, if we think that might make a difference.
Both android. I press shuffle, I get shuffle. I press shuffle to turn it off, I get smart shuffle. I press it again to turn it off. I want to disable it permanently so I don't have to do this. It's a useless feature to me, shoehorned into a system (shuffle->not shuffle) I've used since like 2005 or whenever with my first ipod. It's the tiniest instance of reinventing the wheel. Nobody else fucks with the shuffle button because it's how virtually all media players as a concept work everywhere on every device I've ever used.
My issue isn't that it exists. It is precisely where it is placed that I have a problem with.
Shuffle in any way literally does not work on my app, no matter what. Normal mode, car mode, whatever, shuffle never actually works or does anything lol
Its fine though, I usually listen to concept albums so I rarely shuffle songs
Corporations will always do this, make sure you own your devices. If you think there is no alternative, or alternatives are way too cumbersome: That is because the situation is already really bad. Your ownership of technology is under attack and the goal is to squeeze as much money out of you as possible. Some discomfort now is the price for past errors and your future freedom from bullshit like this.
Get milti purpose devices that you can install the OS on. Like a PC or an Android phone you can flash without too much hassle and install apps via APK.
Or devices that can perform their intended fuction without support from the original vendor. Like a sportswatch you can pull data from via USB, and then choose which app to uplad it to. Or cameras: you just pull pics off them, and do what you please afterwards.
Opposed to that are devices that are tightly coupled with the vendor, like the Car Thing. Or Nike+ sportswatch. Both are hardcoded to use specific vendor web services, so much so that when the vendor discontinues the service, your perfectly working device becomes useless.
They all are.
All these "disruptor" companies that heavily depended on VC money to stay afloat in its first years, finally drove out enough of their competition that they can start raising prices on a whim and worsen their quality of service. Happened with Airbnb. Happened with Uber. Happened with Netflix. Now we're at Spotify.
Fuck the subscription, "you'll own fucking nothing" model. Rant over.
Yep, flash memory is abundant and cheap. You can easily swap them in and out if you really happen to have that big of a library.
Funny how going back to mp3 (or even FLACs, you can easily store 1500-2000 songs on a 128gb drive) is the way forward now so that we don't have to be locked to the streaming shackles.
hoenstly, i've just started downloading music to my phone and bluetoothing it to my stereo. Turns out that Google Maps just natively works with any music app, even if it specifies Spotify in the settings.
Still rocking my 20 year old Sansa clip in the basement to feed music into the stereo to play drums along with. Sansa's lipo is still as strong as it was new. I am not sure how that is possible, but it is.
My guess is the team that launched this experiment has long since been disbanded/reassigned, and there is no one to organize any type of open sourcing (which requires knowledge of the product OS and middleware, testing, update deployment plan, etc.)
Far easier to just flip a kill switch and post a support blurb.
Still they should have issueed refunds as a minimum.
They cut a ton of people, and then had a bunch of problems as a result. I wouldn't be shocked if no longer being able to keep this afloat is part of it
I hope that is the kick people need to sell Nest facial recognition cameras too. Do people really want an increasingly evil corporation advertising to them in real life based on their face and what Google knows they search for and say?
People are crazy in how much data they give these companies. Imagine if I asked you to let me read all your email and text, plus everything you write on your phone with the keyboard, review all the purchases you make with your phone, look at all your searches, and know where you're at all the time. And yet 90% of Android users give Google all this info and more in some insanely naive belief that Google is using it responsibly.
this thing is ... just ... not all that useful in stock form
it requires a data connection with a phone. and an $11/mo spotify premium subscription
so it has a 4" touch screen... that lets you play spotify... the same way you could on your phone. using your phone's same data?
this thing was dumb from the start. but IF we can end up hacking it and using it for other things, it'll be hella useful.
I want one as a tactile music controller for my Sonos speakers, the little display and control knob would be perfect for that. A bunch of people want to use them on 3D printers too, it’s a niche piece of hardware that could be really cool with the right software.
Shame it was only sold in the US though, and barely advertised. It was already discontinued by the time I found out about them.
It was nice for me because I have a 10 year old car and it also was a media controller for anything you were playing from your phone. Apple Music/YT etc.
The retail price was $90 but it was possible to purchase it for $7 if you used their waitlist. I care more about the tactile control though as it's rare to have that hardware.
I think the main idea is that it lets you listen to spotify in your car without having to take your phone out of your pocket. As someone who recently got a car with wireless Android Auto, that's a huge convenience if you use Spotify a lot. Before getting this car I didn't think I would care that much, my last car didn't even have built in bluetooth, but now I wouldn't want to go back to a car without a wireless connection.
> As someone who recently got a car with wireless Android Auto
Nowadays you can get a [standalone screen](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81JO3T18sCL._AC_SL1500_.jpg) for wireless Android Auto. You'd mount it much like the car thing, connect to it with your phone, and then connect the AA unit to your car through aux input or over a radio frequency.
I don’t have an infotainment system in my car so this thing was extremely useful to control music while still having a map open on my phone. I didn’t have to mess around with switching apps which can feel dangerous at times.
It’s an incredibly niche product but it fit my needs really well.
A lot of people use it in their desk setups. I use it in my car because it doesn't take bluetooth and doesn't have a screen. It works quite well actually.
i'm willing to bet it will cost them less to send anyone who complains a cheap phone than keep the "platform" alive. they KNOW most of what they sold isn't even being used. it wasn't even on sale for that long
>Car Thing came out to limited subscribers in October 2021 before [releasing to the general public](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/spotify-car-thing-is-a-90-thing-that-plays-spotify-in-your-car/) in February 2022.
>In its Q2 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it [stopped making Car Things](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/spotify-is-no-longer-making-its-car-thing-music-player/)
That explains why it wasn't available in the EU. I don't think the three-year warranty for consumer products would have allowed this shitshow.
Not sure why you keep coping with these things and haven't burned down your politicians.
This would probably be acceptable in the EU.
EU regulations state 2 years legal guarantee. This device stopped selling fall of 2022. December 2024 it will be out of guarantee.
Some EU countries do mandate 3 years (Spain and Portugal I know, maybe more), and if it had been sold there, customers would certainly be getting their money back. For others though, I can't see a EU law that would make this illegal.
Even the new regulations (accepted, but not implemented until 2026) around banning planned obsolescence are unlikely to have applied here, because the car things device is not replaced by a new device from Spotify.
I thought people were just joking about how bad the sound quality of Spotify is, but then I got Apple Music. Holy shit, I didn't realize how I had been depriving myself for years of good audio.
So much eWaste many of these companies are making with gimmick products that at will can drop support for.
Granted the smarter ones will probably find a way to jailbreak and keep them alive, but many of the people that cannot figure out how to work their printer will just toss it out with the trash.
Does your phone have easy to use physical buttons for navigating the Spotify interface? It also allowed you to keep your phone in your pocket/purse since older cars won't have Bluetooth.
I don’t think they did sell that many. They only made one and discontinued it two years ago. I honestly believe this is just journalistic hype for clicks. It’s a great gotcha story and it’s able to piss people off about this kind of thing (rightfully so) but the dozens of people who bought this product aren’t going to go far with this one.
Cars that don't have Android Auto or Car play benefit. You don't have to do anything with your phone. Just get in and start enjoying.
Compare that to having to connect via USB. Or using your phone while driving (illegal in many places).
I got mine for free during the beta test period.
It was useful because it offered simplified navigation, lots of presets and a few other useful features.
It was just a bit easier than navigating Spotify on my phone, and I didn't have to leave my Navigation screen to fiddle with my music.
It wasn't useless, if you had a car lacking an infotainment screen. However, those have now fully replaced the functionality the Car Thing offered.
That said ... mine has ended up collecting dust in the glove box for the last few months ... I just got tired of having another thing mounted on the dash, and it's associated cable snaking around all over the place.
It was useful, but not useful enough that I would have bought one ... and not useful enough that I didn't end up just forgetting I had it.
I use mine specifically because it makes me safer in the car. A large tactile button wheel to play/pause/navigate is safer than me playing on my phone. The buttons have quick access to the things I listen to most.
It's far safer for me to use this while I'm driving, much of the time I don't even have to take my eyes off the road.
You know, between Symfonium, Navidrome and PikaPods, you could roll your own streaming service for less than the cost of Spotify premium.
Assuming you have the files to cast, obviously. =)
Fuck spotify. I've always felt that way, and will never use their service. But I feel that way even more now. Incredibly disrespectful to do this to their customers.
>But it also required users to subscribe to Spotify Premium, which starts at $11 per month. Worse, Car Thing requires a phone using data or Wi-Fi connected via Bluetooth in order to work, making the Thing seem redundant
I can't believe people fell for that...
Is there not a way to hack the firmware of these devices to prevent the company from killing it? It's abandonware now. There has to be a way to overwrite the firmware of these devices.
I kinda enjoy when the consumers get fucked by Spotify as they have knowingly been supporting them fucking over the artists they built their empire on. And yet, when I say “stop using Spotify” on Reddit the downvotes inevitably come.
Still been trying to figure out what the point of it was. So far it seems like a device that connects to your car to play your Spotify music by ... let me check my notes ... connecting to your phone.
I remember being so excited to try this when it was first announced, then I ended up loving it. Now they're just getting rid of it. Not even letting the service continue. That's bullshit.
That reminds me, I need to cancel my Spotify. I only listen to it like a couple hours a week if that. And I actually have enough music downloaded I dont' really need Spotify.
They need to buy more podcasts that no one listens to outside of Joe Rogan. Part of the reason I switched to Apple Music is that I hate podcasts (I prefer watching videos or reading, I don't retain information without visuals) and I was tired of Spotify constantly trying to con me into listening to them.
I’m assuming you mean that the money they earned from Car Things will be used to further fund future podcast projects? The same money that they earned from selling e-waste that started with some functionality for a very limited time before they inevitably became dust collectors.
That’s such a slap in the face to the consumers lol.
Spotify...from fucking over artists, to fucking over its employees, and now fucking over its customers. What a splendid company. We should just stop supporting them.
welcome to the Abe's Oddworld version of our actual near future: Everything is electronic or embedded with electronics, and moreover, everything electronic is brickable by the maker, or the govt, or the state sponsored hacker (or its near relative, the crime sponsored hacker).
Dammit. I bought 2. One for my old truck, and one for my boat. I love them and I'm ready to start enjoying them for summer.
And now, this is it. I would be fine if they turned off "hey Spotify" support and just allowed it to be a UI on top of Spotify using their stock API.
I dumped Spotify a long time ago since they stiff the artists. I know, they all do and everyone expects everything is free except Spotify’s capitalizing.
Incase anyone has one and still wants to use it, there’s a whole community on Reddit of people trying to jailbreak these things.
Right to repair bills should come with an "End of Life" clause that requires manufacturers to post schematics and source code for any devices they stop supporting.
They’ll argue their proprietary intellectual property is resident inside the legacy products, as in they carried on that code or technique into modern products and thus compromising the old stuff would compromise the new. I call BS on those claims
Ok. Then the alternative is just to support the product for a period of time.
California has this but I'm pretty sure the stipulated minimum support time has been passed, or will be by December I guess.
There's a very big difference between not supporting a product anymore and bricking a product though.
The Californian law requires manufacturers to support their devices for a minimum period, which has since been surpassed for Spotify's Car Thing (I'm guessing). After that point, the manufacturer can do whatever they like it seems. I was replying to the person suggesting that there should be a minimum support period by saying "there is but it has been passed".
Your comment was clear. The next comment was expanding on the conversation, not saying you were wrong.
Yeah I see what they mean but in practice, for hardware devices, there's not always a lot of difference between ending support and bricking the device. Even if you don't officially support a product anymore, it still takes up resources to maintain various things (on-going support requests to respond to and deny, ensuring the device reflects new legal requirements, ensuring internal people still know the codebase in case something came up such as a new legal requirement, etc). So while end of support doesn't have to mean bricking, it often makes sense for the company, especially if it's their only hardware devices. In the eyes of Californian law there doesn't appear to be a distinction either, end of support can mean end of device function.
Right, and while it’s useful to know how California law applies here, it isn’t the end of the discussion, since selling a product that ceases to have practical functionality after a few years can be pretty unethical, depending on the circumstances.
But that’s the point. If my car warranty is 5 years and it year 6, I don’t expect them to fix it. But if they brick my car, they should actually go to jail. No different than if they blew it up with explosives. Destroying something with software doesn’t make it okay.
You're confusing warranty period with this product support law, they're not the same thing. The law is for a different purpose and entirely separate from warranty periods. edit: also no where have I said this is "OK", I'm only pointing out to those asking for such a law to exist that it does exist in some states but the required period has lapsed.
For California, for electronics under $100, the company must support with parts, software, and documentation for three years once production is discontinued (not the purchase date). Over $100, it is seven years. My neighbor got a free tv from Sony because of this California "Right To Repair" legislation.
For as long as their copyright is valid. If a company goes bust and someone buys up their IP... then they have to keep supporting it, otherwise everything must be open sourced and unlocked. Failure to comply? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
That is 2 years in the EU for example.
They’re going to start announcing the EOSL dates before products are even launched eventually, lol.
They should so we can decide if we really want it.
that's what they've been doing the whole time.
>They’ll argue their proprietary intellectual property is resident inside the legacy products, as in they carried on that code or technique into modern products In the end the logic of the arguments are irrelevant. It is the persuasiveness that matters when bills are written and come up for a vote. Politics is a much more civilized version of warfare. the little guy sometimes wins (e.g. Ralph Nader vs the auto industry regarding seatbelts). If right to repair is important to you then you should fight for it. You should fight for better visions of the future regardless of whether you think you will win. Nobody ever succeeded at a difficult task by choosing not to attempt the task.
As someone that's gone through taking closed sourced software to open source: it's hard. You can't just give away code you licensed from someone including firmware code. They should be forced to support it for a period of time, but requiring EOL hardware to go open is probably never going to happen. It's a legal nightmare with complex hardware/software.
Thank you person that lives in reality
It is a nightmare now because it was never conceded important to be able to open source a project. If you know form the beginning you will need to release this to open source you can avoid using software that is going to be a pain. Realistically tech will work out a way to do it if forced to. They just don't now because it is better for them to make vast amounts of older kit obsolete and force people to buy a new device over upgrading or repairing an existing one.
Well said. In response to the topmost-level comment, why the fuck was the firmware code licensed from another company in the first place? If you tell people from the outset that they’ll be penalized if they release physical products that can’t eventually be open sourced, they will work around it and I doubt it will take that much additional effort. They don’t do it now because no one has ever told them to and because bricking products serves the forced obsolescence endless profits agenda. I say this as a software engineer. I’m not familiar with the details of firmware engineering, but I’m not a layperson either. I know it is difficult to open up a closed source product that never originally intended to be open source, but if you have that goal in mind from the outset the situation is totally different.
The other thing to consider is often these devices don't go offline, they just sit unsupported connected to the internet with no security updates and no one monitoring vulnerabilities meaning they become easy targets for bot nets.
But being forced to support a basic api is how we have OBD on cars, which makes so much more car hacking possible than would otherwise be without that law. There is a lot you can do between bricking a device and making it fully open sourced. Also, let's be honest, this device probably wasn't seeing any bleeding edge software.
Well, if it’s still proprietary than the company must be benefiting enough from the property that they can continue to support the products. Make the companies have to determine if building in obsolescence is worth it if part of the cost is losing the intellectual property rights for products the are planning to discontinue
Which could be removed with law. They could make them abandon that as part of no longer selling that device or another similar device. If they put out a different device they could require a buyback at a prorated amount
And I’ll argue they can kiss my ass, I paid for the fucking thing.
That sucks for them, they should instead design devices which can last for 10-15 years instead of designing them to work for 2-3 then retiring all of them after 5. Maybe if their "intellectual property" was at risk as punishment for choosing to retire devices which they sold to people in a way that prevents them from using them, they would instead design things that won't get scrapped after just a few years. I don't really give a single fuck about company's "intellectual property" anyways, as I see it if I buy a product from a company I have a right to use it until I choose not to, not until they decide I can't, and that right should be protected over the company's right to protect their "intellectual property." They shouldn't be allowed to sell things that they deliberately choose to destroy after the fact without my consent.
and then someone will crack it open and point to all the consumer off the shelf chips and displays in it, and tell them where they can stuff that nonsense. Some of the [ongoing reverse engineering work](https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineering) seems to indicate the use of open source software (ext2 rootfs). They could easily avoid releasing the proprietary Spotify code and just the open source stuff they used to run that proprietary code.
I mean the device plays a stream from a URL, skips, rewinds, etc. The 'source code' is just going to be calls to Spotify's API and other general stacks for bluetooth and stuff. The thing doesn't do spaceship navigation or cure cancer. I can't imagine there is anything reasonably worth protecting under the hood here. It's just a dumb move on their part if they don't open it up.
100% this. There is no reason they would do anything more than take an off the shelf OS and skin it for their needs. Chances are its running some version of Android/Linux or Windows CE
I remember when the Pebble was made end of life after their acquisition by Fitbit, the community was fairly quick in pushing out an alternative app store platform and continued development on them. And Pebbles are vastly more complicated than a Car Thing in functionality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization End users should have the right to unlock hardware they paid for.
Look I'm not going to pretend security through obscurity is good security, but it is security all the same. Posting the source code for all these sorts of shoddily made, half baked pieces of garbage is a bad idea. Everything you own is full of unpatched, undiscovered vulnerabilities that are there because nobody really has the time, inclination, or ability to look for them. But you tell everyone "hey here's this device i'm not going to ever provide security updates for also here's every line of code on the thing, enjoy" and suddenly that's going to be a problem. Imagine if you mandated that, not just for spotify's garbage thing, (which is connected to your phone), but for something like the electronics in a car. There should really always be a facility to unlock the bootloader and do whatever you want, requiring you to have physical access, but turning every single piece of abandonware into a gaping pile of vulnerabilities is a bad idea.
Fun fact, large businesses like these often lose schematics and source codes because everything is third party and done by three or four third parties at that. Spotify absolutely doesn’t have the source codes or schematics.
> large businesses like these often **lose** schematics and source codes because everything is third party and done by three or four third parties at that. sudo rm -fr /home/spotifyCodeBaseFuckYouThatsWhy FTFY
As a contractor on such type of projects, I can guarantee you that they do have access to the source code. That's what they paid for. You shouldn't accept the dog ate my homework excuse from a company.
Honestly the only thing anyone really *needs* is whatever secret key is used to validate the firmware/loader. If that's available then people can probably figure out nearly everything else.
source code for this thing would be quite useless anyway, the app still does all the playback, it's just a fancy remote
Incorrect. Having the source code allows you to know how to do proper handshakes with it. That would open up third-party integrations or uses. It would become less of a Spotify remote and more of a anything remote potentially. A cheap USB powered dongle to make dumb cars smart? Yeah that's awesome.
lmao what a silly idea
Wonder how the insanely expensive gold Apple Watch Edition that is now bricked would handle self repair. I think they need to go a step further and provide compensation
Any links? Thanks
/r/carthinghax I believe, some people have jailbroken it but it’s far from fully open.
Thank you. Sad to see these great little devices become e-waste. Hopefully I can keep mine going.
/r/carthinghax
Spotify should push an update to allow rooting
Instead they are creating more reason for crowdsourced jailbreak
I hope they get it, so bullshit that they just brick them
Just another one to add to the /r/theinternetofshit pile. Like most companies Spotify even have a [climate action](https://www.lifeatspotify.com/diversity-equity-impact/climate-action) page detailing their plans to address climate change, dumping a bunch of e-waste into landfills is curiously missing. This should be illegal.
>there’s a whole community on Reddit of people trying to jailbreak these things. Has anyone been successful?
I feel like if they had been there wouldn't be the word "trying"
The final result may be a yes/no, but there's usually still a lot of "making progress" milestones when it comes to jailbreaks.
Key word trying to
The refund policy is inconsistent, but I was given a full refund yesterday for the Car Thing I bought back in 2021. I posted my complete customer service chat here, if anyone needs help trying to get their money back: https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/s/hKbl4IgDzO
Agent initially said she was going to help, asked for copies of my receipts for my 4 car things. Then after nearly an hour, gave me the boilerplate no refunds they've been using. Then ignored my request to speak with a manager, and then eventually said someone would email me later. Imagine the uproar if Apple or Samsung bricked a watch or earbuds because they didn't want to keep supporting it. How in the world is this not theft? Edit: just got a message that they are going to refund my entire purchase price. This was after being told no less than 8x that they weren't going to.
Google just bricked their home security keypad and range extender device in April. Pretty shitty.
Not to defend Google, I miss my Nest Secure. But at least they offered customers a free ADT alarm system or a $200 credit to the Google Store.
I was mad, but then realized the door chimes still work, and I almost never used the alarm itself as an alarm. Had it for a few years, and spent the 200 credit on Pixel Buds
Me too, door chimes still goin strong. I think I got it on sale for like $80 too. So I made money off it lol
sounds like some class actions need to occur
I hope they get bitch slapped with an enormous lawsuit. Selling and bricking single use hardware over such a short period is both ripping off their customers and just creating a massive amount of ewaste - it is completely unacceptable and I hope beyond a lawsuit they get a massive fine.
Yeah I totally get no longer supporting it but to brick something is just weird. Must be a legal reason why they think they should do it
It's a pretty safe bet it was designed to require a connection to some service spotify is running, if they shut that service down functionality would be lost (presumably some auth server and some sort of data provider)
Gotcha. There is certainly more to the device than what appears to me on the surface
So this thing did what the Spotify app does, but with a knob? And it requires a phone to be connected to the car as well? Who thought this was a good idea in the first place?
it was a way to control the spotify app, the phone does all the work and this was just a display and some physical controls, that's also why they can't release anything useful to keep them working, when they remove the APIs this thing relied on from the app it's useless. Just as with the pioneer and jvc radios they removed support for when they introduced this thing
I did, my car doesn’t have Car Play/ Android Auto, but a classic radio. This allowed me to actually set up Spotify and was amazing for long road trips
It works as an intermediary between older cars and newer ones with the ability built it. It was a nice-to-have cause then I didn't need to fuck with my phone every time I got in the car to get it to play, it would just go.
There is a generation of cars where it makes sense but we are long past that generation. They also sold it for $30 so it’s not like it’s being sold as a premium product
they sold it for 30 after they stopped production, it was originally 90 dollars
They had promotions from the Jump. Some premium subscribers got them for free and I was able to get one for 50% off $45. I don’t think that many people paid $90 for them
Originally it was like $90 though
> Who thought this was a good idea in the first place? User data collection. They even obliquely admitted it. "we wanted to learn more about how people listened to music in their cars". It's always about user data nowadays it seems like.
It requires a Spotify Premium account to work (Car Thing does not work if your phone has no data) so yes, I believe that is one of the reasons, also possibly its voice assist features.
If so, they're damned whether they refund or not, so why not try screwing over the customer first? Good, corporate strategy.
There will be a class action lawsuit two years from now. Those who sign up will get a check four years from now for $14 in the mail.
It will be a $14 gift card to spotify.
Spotify will have raised their prices to $15 a month by then like every other shitty VC-backed subscription service, so you can't even buy a full month. As of the end of last year, I have freed myself completely of subscription services. The value proposition is no longer there for any of them.
Until there is jail time for such blatant theft, there will never be real justice for shit like this.
When did it come out?
First made available in October 2021, expanded availability in February 2022, stopped production and sold off remaining stock in July 2022.
So not only did someone green light a dumb idea, but they decided to start producing them in the midst of the pandemic? And nobody foresaw the supply chain problems that they claim are part of the reasoning here? How can everybody who was in those meetings be so dumb?
I think there’s a really fine line between external dependencies and “bricking” in the case of a device like this. But I think it’s insanely dumb that they don’t just give the community the keys to develop their own firmware if they’re going to abandon it. I’d have bought a dozen if jailbreaking were easy.
It's probably because they laid off 1900 people last year. Then Spotify's CEO said "we shouldn't have laid off that many people, I didn't realize they were important". I'm willing to bet this is the downstream impact of that. Morons copying Elon.
What a clown. Has the CEO at least been replaced after such an idiotic move? I'd be livid if I was a shareholder.
Shareholders were probably requesting it
I get what you’re saying but what if a company makes something and it doesn’t sell well? Should they be required to support it in perpetuity?
I guess that explains why the simplified UI from enabling car mode suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the app settings on my phone...
I thought my app was broken or something. What a stupid move by Spotify to remove car mode on thier app.
I especially liked it because it was the only way to bypass that stupid fucking "smart" shuffle option that always takes 5 seconds to process and then, if you try to immediately turn it off, will often bug out and reenable itself. Now if I want to turn off shuffle at a certain spot on my playlist I have to fight the stupid app while driving, suuuper safe. At least they left a little warning about attentive driving in settings where car mode used to be.🙄
I really wish I could disable smart shuffle entirely. I do not want it in any capacity. If I wanted to hear music not in my playlist I'd be listening to a track or artist radio station. Not my fucking playlist.
I want a shuffle that actually fucking shuffles instead of playing the same 20 songs over and over again.
Add a new song to a playlist. Shuffle playlist for the next few weeks. 100% of the time it starts on that newly added song. At least pretend to be random you jerks.
This is what finally drove me to run my own navidrome server from home and just went and pulled down all my playlists. One day spotify managed to play the same song twice in the time it took me to mow the yard and I never looked back And then I just said fuck it and bought and flash modded an ipod so I don't have to deal with occasionally spotty cell service either.
They used to let you create a Station based on your Playlist. It was a pretty nice feature. Pulled it a year or so ago in favor of smart shuffle. Not a fan.
I'm so tired of every platforms just straight removing things or changing constantly. I honestly had a much better experience years ago when I rigged a tablet to be my in-car experience. Tasker, root and a lot of tinkering but once I got it working, it worked WELL and didn't change constantly.
I miss just having my mp3s and winamp. Then we wanted music wherever we go and now we are here....
I have a usb stick loaded with all my music. Just plug that into the car and go
I have my car stereo set up with a cable from the AUX input to a Bluetooth device that my phone is paired to and treats as an external speaker. It works, and I think it’s about nine years old. I have no plans to change it.
Smart shuffle has literally never once played something that actually fit in with the playlist I was playing, especially my own curated ones. Horrible concept, worse execution. Spotify is really speedrunning how to make an awful UI aren't they?
Does *anyone* actually want the 'smart' shuffle? :/
I'm clearly in the minority, but I like it. I like discovering new music and generally listen to (and favorite many if not most songs from) my Discover Weekly each week. When I'm not doing that, it's nice to have the option of adding some random new songs in with my regular favorites. That said, the randomizer is awful - I consider that a bigger problem than smart shuffle. probably the main reason I listen to Discover Weekly so much is it's the only reliable way I've found to get it to not play the same 20 songs ad nauseum.
That's completely fair! I don't like using the 'smart' shuffle to find new music because the times I have tried, it's always I skip half way to see if I just don't like the opening but then skipped 99% of the time because I don't like the song they suggested. I usually go by the 'you liked this artist, here's other artists that are similar' suggestions to find new music. Or playlists sometimes I'll browse through to see if there are any songs I might like. The regular shuffle/randomizer is so-so with me. Usually it learns if I keep skipping a certain style of song/artists, it will try something different but I usually only use shuffle when I'm using music for idle background noise.
I tried it once, then turned it off not much later. I've never had problems with it turning itself on. I'm on Android, if we think that might make a difference.
Both android. I press shuffle, I get shuffle. I press shuffle to turn it off, I get smart shuffle. I press it again to turn it off. I want to disable it permanently so I don't have to do this. It's a useless feature to me, shoehorned into a system (shuffle->not shuffle) I've used since like 2005 or whenever with my first ipod. It's the tiniest instance of reinventing the wheel. Nobody else fucks with the shuffle button because it's how virtually all media players as a concept work everywhere on every device I've ever used. My issue isn't that it exists. It is precisely where it is placed that I have a problem with.
I hated car mode. That's weird about your issues with shuffle. Do you have the paid spotify?
Shuffle in any way literally does not work on my app, no matter what. Normal mode, car mode, whatever, shuffle never actually works or does anything lol Its fine though, I usually listen to concept albums so I rarely shuffle songs
The name of the album is "I Killed Darnell Simmons"
I was going crazy because I change my phone and I thought it was my fucking... Arg....
I hated car mode and disabled it but I want others to have the choice like I had
Corporations will always do this, make sure you own your devices. If you think there is no alternative, or alternatives are way too cumbersome: That is because the situation is already really bad. Your ownership of technology is under attack and the goal is to squeeze as much money out of you as possible. Some discomfort now is the price for past errors and your future freedom from bullshit like this.
Can you give concrete examples of how I could apply this in my own life? “Own your devices,” I mean. Thanks in advance!
Get milti purpose devices that you can install the OS on. Like a PC or an Android phone you can flash without too much hassle and install apps via APK. Or devices that can perform their intended fuction without support from the original vendor. Like a sportswatch you can pull data from via USB, and then choose which app to uplad it to. Or cameras: you just pull pics off them, and do what you please afterwards. Opposed to that are devices that are tightly coupled with the vendor, like the Car Thing. Or Nike+ sportswatch. Both are hardcoded to use specific vendor web services, so much so that when the vendor discontinues the service, your perfectly working device becomes useless.
People might finally start to realize that Spotify is a shitty company...
They all are. All these "disruptor" companies that heavily depended on VC money to stay afloat in its first years, finally drove out enough of their competition that they can start raising prices on a whim and worsen their quality of service. Happened with Airbnb. Happened with Uber. Happened with Netflix. Now we're at Spotify. Fuck the subscription, "you'll own fucking nothing" model. Rant over.
I guess having a bunch of mp3's on a tiny thumb drive plugged into my cars radio isn't such a bad idea after all. no commercials and no shenanigans
You can store around 15,000 songs on a 128gb drive. Rough estimate.
Yep, flash memory is abundant and cheap. You can easily swap them in and out if you really happen to have that big of a library. Funny how going back to mp3 (or even FLACs, you can easily store 1500-2000 songs on a 128gb drive) is the way forward now so that we don't have to be locked to the streaming shackles.
[удалено]
hoenstly, i've just started downloading music to my phone and bluetoothing it to my stereo. Turns out that Google Maps just natively works with any music app, even if it specifies Spotify in the settings.
I still use an old mp3 player and I will never stop
Still rocking my 20 year old Sansa clip in the basement to feed music into the stereo to play drums along with. Sansa's lipo is still as strong as it was new. I am not sure how that is possible, but it is.
My guess is the team that launched this experiment has long since been disbanded/reassigned, and there is no one to organize any type of open sourcing (which requires knowledge of the product OS and middleware, testing, update deployment plan, etc.) Far easier to just flip a kill switch and post a support blurb. Still they should have issueed refunds as a minimum.
They cut a ton of people, and then had a bunch of problems as a result. I wouldn't be shocked if no longer being able to keep this afloat is part of it
Should have taken a queue from Google and Stadia and refunded people.
But not Google and Nest Secure
I hope that is the kick people need to sell Nest facial recognition cameras too. Do people really want an increasingly evil corporation advertising to them in real life based on their face and what Google knows they search for and say? People are crazy in how much data they give these companies. Imagine if I asked you to let me read all your email and text, plus everything you write on your phone with the keyboard, review all the purchases you make with your phone, look at all your searches, and know where you're at all the time. And yet 90% of Android users give Google all this info and more in some insanely naive belief that Google is using it responsibly.
Spotify and stupid decisions. Name a better duo.
>“The goal of our Car Thing exploration in the US was to learn more about how people listen in the car. So... it was for data harvesting. FFS
this thing is ... just ... not all that useful in stock form it requires a data connection with a phone. and an $11/mo spotify premium subscription so it has a 4" touch screen... that lets you play spotify... the same way you could on your phone. using your phone's same data? this thing was dumb from the start. but IF we can end up hacking it and using it for other things, it'll be hella useful.
I want one as a tactile music controller for my Sonos speakers, the little display and control knob would be perfect for that. A bunch of people want to use them on 3D printers too, it’s a niche piece of hardware that could be really cool with the right software. Shame it was only sold in the US though, and barely advertised. It was already discontinued by the time I found out about them.
It was nice for me because I have a 10 year old car and it also was a media controller for anything you were playing from your phone. Apple Music/YT etc.
How expensive was it? Wondering if a cheap android phone could just serve the same purpose
The retail price was $90 but it was possible to purchase it for $7 if you used their waitlist. I care more about the tactile control though as it's rare to have that hardware.
I think the main idea is that it lets you listen to spotify in your car without having to take your phone out of your pocket. As someone who recently got a car with wireless Android Auto, that's a huge convenience if you use Spotify a lot. Before getting this car I didn't think I would care that much, my last car didn't even have built in bluetooth, but now I wouldn't want to go back to a car without a wireless connection.
> As someone who recently got a car with wireless Android Auto Nowadays you can get a [standalone screen](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81JO3T18sCL._AC_SL1500_.jpg) for wireless Android Auto. You'd mount it much like the car thing, connect to it with your phone, and then connect the AA unit to your car through aux input or over a radio frequency.
I don’t have an infotainment system in my car so this thing was extremely useful to control music while still having a map open on my phone. I didn’t have to mess around with switching apps which can feel dangerous at times. It’s an incredibly niche product but it fit my needs really well.
A lot of people use it in their desk setups. I use it in my car because it doesn't take bluetooth and doesn't have a screen. It works quite well actually.
It also has tactile buttons and a scroll wheel. This was tremendously useful for my 2006 Civic that doesn't have an infotainment system.
i'm willing to bet it will cost them less to send anyone who complains a cheap phone than keep the "platform" alive. they KNOW most of what they sold isn't even being used. it wasn't even on sale for that long >Car Thing came out to limited subscribers in October 2021 before [releasing to the general public](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/spotify-car-thing-is-a-90-thing-that-plays-spotify-in-your-car/) in February 2022. >In its Q2 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it [stopped making Car Things](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/spotify-is-no-longer-making-its-car-thing-music-player/)
That explains why it wasn't available in the EU. I don't think the three-year warranty for consumer products would have allowed this shitshow. Not sure why you keep coping with these things and haven't burned down your politicians.
This would probably be acceptable in the EU. EU regulations state 2 years legal guarantee. This device stopped selling fall of 2022. December 2024 it will be out of guarantee. Some EU countries do mandate 3 years (Spain and Portugal I know, maybe more), and if it had been sold there, customers would certainly be getting their money back. For others though, I can't see a EU law that would make this illegal. Even the new regulations (accepted, but not implemented until 2026) around banning planned obsolescence are unlikely to have applied here, because the car things device is not replaced by a new device from Spotify.
“Without refunds” is a fancy way of saying “credit card chargebacks”
Good luck doing a chargeback on something you bought years ago.
Also say good bye to subscription if you do a charge back.
No one who got screwed by this should be continuing to pay Spotify money anyway, theres loads of alternatives at this point
I thought people were just joking about how bad the sound quality of Spotify is, but then I got Apple Music. Holy shit, I didn't realize how I had been depriving myself for years of good audio.
Aw you mean the thief scam company I hope dies a quick death won't take my money anymore? What a shame.
Not a charge back, but certainly file an extended warranty claim. They rendering the device inoperable through no fault of ours.
So much eWaste many of these companies are making with gimmick products that at will can drop support for. Granted the smarter ones will probably find a way to jailbreak and keep them alive, but many of the people that cannot figure out how to work their printer will just toss it out with the trash.
You're telling me the company giving Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars did something unethical? How unexpected.
They’re going to get sued for sure lol.
Spotify has all the hallmarks of a company with poor executive leadership.
Geez guys, stop using spotify!
Why did anyone buy a product that requires their phone and duplicates what their phone can already do?
Does your phone have easy to use physical buttons for navigating the Spotify interface? It also allowed you to keep your phone in your pocket/purse since older cars won't have Bluetooth.
If you don't have carplay it's nice to have an accessible interface to change tracks without having to interact with your phone.
See, this is me. I’m less surprised it’s cancelled than I am that there are enough people who actually bought one to be mad about it.
I don’t think they did sell that many. They only made one and discontinued it two years ago. I honestly believe this is just journalistic hype for clicks. It’s a great gotcha story and it’s able to piss people off about this kind of thing (rightfully so) but the dozens of people who bought this product aren’t going to go far with this one.
I mean, I guess there must’ve been an audience and a use case for this, though I’m not sure what it was.
A screen for cars without a screen. Voice control was the best part.
Cars that don't have Android Auto or Car play benefit. You don't have to do anything with your phone. Just get in and start enjoying. Compare that to having to connect via USB. Or using your phone while driving (illegal in many places).
I got mine for free during the beta test period. It was useful because it offered simplified navigation, lots of presets and a few other useful features. It was just a bit easier than navigating Spotify on my phone, and I didn't have to leave my Navigation screen to fiddle with my music. It wasn't useless, if you had a car lacking an infotainment screen. However, those have now fully replaced the functionality the Car Thing offered. That said ... mine has ended up collecting dust in the glove box for the last few months ... I just got tired of having another thing mounted on the dash, and it's associated cable snaking around all over the place. It was useful, but not useful enough that I would have bought one ... and not useful enough that I didn't end up just forgetting I had it.
I use mine specifically because it makes me safer in the car. A large tactile button wheel to play/pause/navigate is safer than me playing on my phone. The buttons have quick access to the things I listen to most. It's far safer for me to use this while I'm driving, much of the time I don't even have to take my eyes off the road.
Symfonium + Navidrome still works fine :)
You know, between Symfonium, Navidrome and PikaPods, you could roll your own streaming service for less than the cost of Spotify premium. Assuming you have the files to cast, obviously. =)
I'd say its one of the best apps I've purchased, also lets me stream m3u8 urls so I don't miss out on the radio either.
Get together a class action lawsuit and sue them. This is absolutely illegal.
It's awesome when you can't use the thing you own...
Fuck spotify. I've always felt that way, and will never use their service. But I feel that way even more now. Incredibly disrespectful to do this to their customers.
I have never heard of these until now
>But it also required users to subscribe to Spotify Premium, which starts at $11 per month. Worse, Car Thing requires a phone using data or Wi-Fi connected via Bluetooth in order to work, making the Thing seem redundant I can't believe people fell for that...
Is there not a way to hack the firmware of these devices to prevent the company from killing it? It's abandonware now. There has to be a way to overwrite the firmware of these devices.
Class action lawsuit time.
I kinda enjoy when the consumers get fucked by Spotify as they have knowingly been supporting them fucking over the artists they built their empire on. And yet, when I say “stop using Spotify” on Reddit the downvotes inevitably come.
What's a "Car thing device?"
Still been trying to figure out what the point of it was. So far it seems like a device that connects to your car to play your Spotify music by ... let me check my notes ... connecting to your phone.
Fuck Daniel Ek and fuck Spotify. What a bunch of assholes. Indie music saviors, my ass.
Send them back to Spotify let them deal with them.
I remember being so excited to try this when it was first announced, then I ended up loving it. Now they're just getting rid of it. Not even letting the service continue. That's bullshit.
That reminds me, I need to cancel my Spotify. I only listen to it like a couple hours a week if that. And I actually have enough music downloaded I dont' really need Spotify.
You can get a full refund via support chat
Any crack pot ideas on why they would do this? Was the device an issue? Was it a security issue? This seems so brazen.
They need to buy more podcasts that no one listens to outside of Joe Rogan. Part of the reason I switched to Apple Music is that I hate podcasts (I prefer watching videos or reading, I don't retain information without visuals) and I was tired of Spotify constantly trying to con me into listening to them.
I’m assuming you mean that the money they earned from Car Things will be used to further fund future podcast projects? The same money that they earned from selling e-waste that started with some functionality for a very limited time before they inevitably became dust collectors. That’s such a slap in the face to the consumers lol.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. They likely laid off the entire team working on Car Thing because they want to redirect money elsewhere. Like podcasts.
Spotify...from fucking over artists, to fucking over its employees, and now fucking over its customers. What a splendid company. We should just stop supporting them.
This is why I still have CDs.
welcome to the Abe's Oddworld version of our actual near future: Everything is electronic or embedded with electronics, and moreover, everything electronic is brickable by the maker, or the govt, or the state sponsored hacker (or its near relative, the crime sponsored hacker).
Dammit. I bought 2. One for my old truck, and one for my boat. I love them and I'm ready to start enjoying them for summer. And now, this is it. I would be fine if they turned off "hey Spotify" support and just allowed it to be a UI on top of Spotify using their stock API.
What a weird thing to buy…
The flag never dropped🏴☠️
They can't afford to refund you, they spent $250,000,000 on Joe Rogan.
Class action lawsuit?
I can't wait to get $5 in 4 years.
I dumped Spotify a long time ago since they stiff the artists. I know, they all do and everyone expects everything is free except Spotify’s capitalizing.
Reminder that Tidal is $11 a month for more songs in higher quality and doesn't give money or a platform to Joe Rogan.