Using a Spotify Car Thing in 2024 (and why it will soon be eWaste...) 

I feel like that the volume indicator not disappearing when muted is an intentional feature. When you're driving it is useful to have an obvious indication that the reason music isn't playing is that it is muted. Certainly could've been implemented better.

Playing with my thing?

never knew spotify made cleaning cloths :O

Still more useful than the rabbit r1

I've been advocating for people to turn it into an Android Auto/Apple Carplay device, like a car head unit. This can theoretically run some sort of software that is similar to any modern car unit and allow for wireless connections. The device has trash specs, and is slow just like any car head unit. The amount of storage is more than enough to get something like an offline maps installed and working.

The ideal thing would be a mod of the Spotify app that adds the functionality of the car thing back in

Spotify should've given this UI to the phone app, so you can just use a mount to attach your phone and it will be much faster and have a better screen than this Thing

Bricking devices should be illegal. At least these are hackable.

Can I just say right, this guy may be one of the most underrated tech RU-vidrs on the whole internet right now.

I've only just heard of this thing a week ago and am already disappointed it's being discontinued.

The problem with your proposed solution is that there is a limit to how long you can have downloaded songs before having to connect to the internet to verify the upkeep of the subscription. It just lengthens the time that it is useful. This is also assuming that you can get a device that you keep offline and never connect to the internet.

I’ve had the car thing for about a year in my Mx-5 and it’s mostly reliable. That volume issue isn’t the knob, you just have to have the volume at 1 or more to have the bar go away. The only time I would have an issue is if I had another Bluetooth device connected prior to turning the car thing on, the car thing would not auto connect. even though it’s connected and thought the phone and bringing up Spotify automatically.

YOOOOOOO new frokfrdk vid

Heard of the car thing when a lot of channels were covering it, but it never made sense since I need a phone or some device to connect it with to be usable. It looked neat, but that was about it. If it was a self contained proper Spotify device with that UI and a way to get internet connection maybe it would have aged better.

The Car Thing runs a webpage in Chrome; it’s not loading data from the Spotify app on your phone but rather getting its data from the built-in Chrome webpage. People are calling it a hard brick because Spotify is refusing to update it. Additionally, the Car Thing doesn't have enough horsepower to run Linux or any other OS. For example, it has the same amount of RAM as an iPhone 4.

Oh, I seen my name on the screen THANK YOU!

You can get devices very similar to the car thing that have full carplay/android auto compatibility and interface with your original car radio.

i still use an mp3 player (hifi walker with rockbox) for my regular music needs, having a specific thing for music has saved my phone lots of battery & feeling for physical buttons while driving or cooking or taking a walk instead of having to stop and look at my phone has been better for my anxiety & safety. conceptually this would be such a cool idea, i'd love an interface like this that works with multiple streaming platforms & other inputs like mp3 players. i hope the people working on mods can keep this thing alive and open it up for everyone to play with.

Ay lexan I'm glad you actually have a sustainable channel now, I'm not sure if you like doing this but I'm sure it's worth it, keep grinding bro

spotify branded car :3

Spotify should put stock Android on the “Car Thing” if Spotify cared about the environment

i love watching frokfdk play with his (car) thing and touch its knob

Mitski is bros workout music 😭

I agree with you frokfrdk that Spotify will just patch the software to disable but Spotify is also good at supporting older version of there app they just dropped support on ios 6 for iPhones and ipods so just have an old phone and disable auto update and should be good for a temp fix

12:19 *you surely mean that the *left side* is the correct one ;) (No anger ofc, great Video!)

pro tip: you can cut off the blue removing tab to make the plastic screen protector a real screen protector i remember finding one a few months ago on ebay for like 25€, i should have bought it :(

would be neat to just turn it into an android auto mirror type device, the knob is a nice thing to have and if its just an android auto display, you can use any audio player you like

What's up guys it's (a sound my accent can not let me produce) your channel deserves alot more subs, the content is so cool and so is the host

It's not quite the same, but i've been using the headunit reloaded app as of late. It basically opens the android auto ui on any android phone without an external head unit. it is $4.99, but i think it is well worth the price tag compared to outright buying a proper android auto compatible headunit. It can even be set to automatically launch when your headphone jack/adapter is connected.

yay! cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

You can already modify app id's. Ofc you'd have to try and make the code the same as spotify's code when it comes to commu icating with the car thing but besides that there could be diffrences like enabling multiple file type support like flac, wav etc. I'm sure people are gonna go it since its been open sourced. People are alreadycon it

u bought it on my bday :)

Looks like when the volume is on zero the buttons will not appear, kind of an indication for "mute". Bad UI/UX

Would be great for a Plexamp control/streamer that you can hook up to a receiver

goddamit this item is actually really good for something i wanna build in a car.... i hope the community can figure out how to keep it alive later,

I would love this thing for my car if I could jailbreak it and get my own interface running on it to interact with Pulsar since I don't like Spotify

The real tragedy is how useless it is overall due to the hardware being so horrible. It's already been open sourced, so at least there will be aftermarket firmware mods. But the things you can do with it will be so absurdly limited. You really will have to be willing to waste time and money to build a project around this in the future (unless you're making a RU-vid video about it, I bet that till get some views due to the backlash to this).

frokfrdk played with his thing on camera, wow

"members first" I WANTED IT EARLY TOO.

an answer in search of a problem if you ask me, not surprised its getting disposed of.

spotify has done this in the past. I am having a pioneer DEX 7800DAB Car stereo with spotify support. just some day it stopped working. It was so nice to scroll through playlists and albums on the stereo itself. It shure would possible to sue pioneer or spotify for that in the US.

"Playing with my thing"

1 million subs soon!

I just love that thing. Was about to buy it from ebay and then, they announced they'll brick it... Wtf spotify. Is there something similar on the market?

playing with my thing to this video

"Playing with my thing" ayo 💀

That thumbnail...

What I don’t understand is that I own a device with very similar specs to the car thing and yet it’s perfectly capable Fiio m7. Yet Spotify seems to think that those specifications are useless. And by similar, I mean,half a gig of ram and 4gb ram although the amlogic inside the car thing has four cores. And the Fiio has an old smart watch CPU. I’ve gotten the fiio to do some mighty big tasks for its specs, and I fully expect the car thing is capable of the same tasks.

Sick

A nice display for only skip music

It sadly wont be able to be used for that much because of how underpowered it is... But i'm sure people will create at least some things for it

Apple iD account lock is not a soft brick as you call it it’s hard coded into the motherboard

I didn't have that weird volume behavior on mine. I also didn't know about swiping but it probably said something about that during set up. Now don't get me wrong Software is a little buggy at times it will just freeze up or disconnect but it's been pretty good for me. I got it as a controller so I could control break music between bands. I liked it so much I ended up actually double-sided 3M sticky typing it in my car well that was a bad permanent choice. I kind of wish it acted as a line out audio device but I don't know how they would've done that without sending Audio over Bluetooth which would've had terrible delay and we were us audio quality. I originally set it up with android but almost got into an accident with it because a song came on I couldn't quite hear the lyrics I turned it up a bit and then a few seconds then it got dead quiet now I'm driving while this is happening and I'm trying to figure out why and what's going on. Turns out after you turn your volume up on android into the red it automatically turns it down after so many minutes and then you have to finish your device out from between the seats because of course that's the time it falls down there. I ended up switching to an iPhone because iPhone let you limit the volume control but it's not enabled by default with no option to disable. I really hope somebody figures out unlock the whole thing the function and fixes some of the functionality issues. Like not being able to connect 2 devices. And in some cases I think it actually makes more sense for new vehicles as it just is a dumb controller for Spotify no need to fumble around trying to find the app and switching between things it's just music control all the time. I reach over and hit some thing and it does that. I would love to see a new version of this that acts like a Internet radio connects over Wi-Fi (Home or personal hotspot) and has a selectable line out/headphone out. And just sort of worked like an appliance phone not necessarily required as long as it's able to get to the Internet. Yes why do they have to break it there's even a generic Bluetooth protocol for music control and they can't even enable that to make it function with anything on the device after they discontinue it into a brick.

Try using it after being discontinued who knows will work

When I first saw the title I thought it was some unprofessional title and then I found out the actual name💀

I think what it's doing is piggybacking off of your phone's internet to tell the spotify website what you're listening to as it's synced across every device iirc.

I first heard of this about a week ago. I thought people were being funny. But that's the real name.

most useful spotify product:

The OS in my car has been f*cked since the upgrade to Android 12, it doesn't change the name of the song anymore (or it does completely randomly, like every 2 hours), shuffle doesn't work and it just doesn't even say a song is playing sometimes. I wanted something to make Spotify easier to use and I'm very happy I went with one of those cheap Android Auto tablet-thingy that just stick to your dashboard, the Car Thing was definitely an option I looked into and decided against. Sure, those chinese device are kinda slow and the touchscreen isn't the best, but at least, it WORKS and since it's Android Auto, it won't get abandonned in a few months.

nice

cant believe my thing will be bricked in 6 months... wait a minute.

Womp Womp!

“Just make an app pretending to be spotify simple” proceeds to tell us he doesn’t know what he’s talking abt

wow

No physical mods needed. But either forcing it to accept different apps or even running a different system are the other options. And nobody wants to do that themselves.

I want one :C just to find some way maybe to put linux on it and run some random stuff lol

This video seems like a dankpods video

6:30 W music taste

Mitski at the gym, 10/10

Can you run Android on the Car Thing?

shout out funky stuff

I thought you were joking when you said Car Thing, but it is actually called car thing 😂

rip bud 🪦

0:55 that's my bday lol

playing with my what

Until 1:30 I assumed you just called it car thing for funsies,... no wonder it didn't catch on.

The car thing? Kachao???!!!

imagine getting sent a zip bomb on that thing

MITSKI MENTIONED

1:34 leet ar thing👍

The hacking community is working on a super easy app for hacking the car thing for a seemless setup

imma buy one so i can sue them

Try To Use the Lenovo G550 in 2024

Spotify's biggest blunder. They announce the death of Car Thing and the next month announce ANOTHER price increase for the service. I dropped them and refunded my CarThing.

Are we just gonna ignore that he listens to Mitski? :3

Can you flash android on it?

Shoutouts to Flying Beagle!

This sucks I wanted this but never got it I eventually saw someone use it in there gaming setup as a mini monitor below there main one wich I loved and wanted one immediately then a few days later same thing they announced the cancelation smh

Crapify. Better use CD's and iPods again

Bros reminds me of dankpods

A THING

/mu/ core music taste

vehicle reveal

Legally. Using the car thing. Is not distinct from using a phone. Which means, a company as large as Spotify, gets to argue with the US Govt. which means brick them all or pay up. And feds cost more than you do.

Well at least they made this thing (haha) open source right? R-right?

I don’t see why you cant just turn it into an mp3 player. its simple enough for something with those specks, and 4GB is still a lot of songs.

Bro get yourself cheap carplay/android auto screen from China. I'm rocking it for a few months now and it's great for old shitboxes

Just get an external aliexpress display that supports carplay

Knife safety my dude. Be careful you almost just cut yourself. 0:51

also what os does this thing run?