Defunct Spotify Car Thing Goes Open Source

Spotify is still the most famous and largest music service in the world, which offers a great user experience. However, since quite a few users listen to music in their cars, at the end of April 2021, Spotify decided to prepare an extremely interesting portable player. The device, branded "Car Thing", was only available to select users in the United States. Only a few months later, it was available for purchase in other parts of the world.

As we have unfortunately already reported, the device with the sales tag "Car Thing" did not convince users. This is also why Spotify has decided to end support for their Car Thing portable player. It will completely cease to function on December 9 this year. This, of course, angered many users of the popular service. US users even announced a class action lawsuit. But at Spotify, they tried to pay off at least by making the device open source.

The published documents show that Spotify Car Thing is based on a modified open source version of the Linux operating system. The hardware is based on the Amlogic platform, which is not among the most powerful. Therefore, many users are not overly impressed with Spotify's move. What's more, they even called the open source Spotify Car Thing player open source electronic junk that has no practical use in the open source community.