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What hacking Car Thing taught me about Spotify hardware

The other day, it finally happened: Spotify killed my favorite way of using its service on the go – its Car Thing display.

This didn’t come as much of a surprise. After releasing Car Thing as its first hardware product in early 2022, Spotify quickly changed its tune. In July of 2022, Spotify announced that it would discontinue Car Thing; earlier this year, it warned that existing Car Thing devices would cease operating in December.

Spotify told users like me that they should recycle the device when that time had come. Instead, when mine stopped working this past weekend, I hacked it, and installed an alternative app framework on it that allows me to run it as a Spotify controller on my desk.

Doing so, talking to one of the developers behind this hacked version, and reading through a bunch of eulogies former Car Thing developers have posted on LinkedIn in recent days has given me a new appreciation of Spotify’s complicated hardware journey.

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