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Since Spotify announced it was discontinuing Car Thing, there has been pressure on the company to open up the product and let users continue to tweak it and use it. As it turns out, Spotify has already done most of the work. But Car Thing was already too underpowered, barely able to handle an OS like Android, and was a waste product to begin with.
The Spotify Car Thing was widely launched in 2022, and was already discontinued just a few months later. But last month, Spotify announced that it would phase out all remaining Car Thing units on the market and tell users to throw them away. Legal pressure has forced the company to offer refunds in some cases, but things are in chaos.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Car Thing has always been a limited-edition device, and the company’s decision means the device will remain pure e-waste.
But it was inevitable.
As many who have dug into the Car Thing have found, Spotify has long sold underpowered hardware. Twitter/X’s @MarcelD505, a developer who helped get the Rabbit R1 running a full Android build, found that the device had just 512MB of RAM when playing around with it. He was able to get the device to show a web view of the Spotify web player and do other things, but that was it.
Technically speaking, the device is already open source. Review Geek The editor-in-chief noted on Twitter/X and YouTube that Spotify has already posted the core source code for the device on GitHub, and also noted that the Amlogic chip that powers the device makes it fairly easy to mod.
Ultimately, the problem with the Spotify Car Thing is that it’s an incredibly underpowered device. Hendrickson adds that the device has 512MB of RAM, but only 4GB of storage, and that its Amlogic processor is “weak.”
That means there’s no way the Spotify Car Thing will be able to run the latest version of Android: As of Android 13 in 2022, the minimum memory requirement is 2GB RAM, but Google appears to be requiring devices to have 16GB of storage. In theory, the open-source nature of Android means those requirements could be expanded, but there’s no way the Car Thing, which is just 25% of the minimum requirement, could meet them.
The Spotify Car Thing was, in a sense, e-waste from the start, because it was designed for one specific purpose. It was inevitable that Spotify would eventually drop support for the product, or that their requirements for it would outstrip what the flimsy hardware could accommodate.
It’s still entirely possible that some use cases for a Spotify Car Thing will develop, but it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see anything particularly impressive released, and certainly not on Android.
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