Spotify Car Thing is underpowered e-waste that wouldn’t be able to run Android anyway

Ben Schoon | Jun 7 2024 - 7:46 am PT

Ever since Spotify announced that it would kill Car Thing, there’s been a push for the company to open the product to allow users to tweak it to keep it useful. But, as it turns out, Spotify has already done most of that legwork, but the Car Thing is already so underpowered that, not only could it barely handle an OS like Android, but it could have already been called e-waste from the start.

The Spotify Car Thing was launched widely in 2022 and, barely a few months later, the device was already discontinued. But, last month, Spotify announced that it would kill any remaining Car Thing units out in the wild, telling users to throw them away. Legal pressure pushed the company to offer refunds in some cases, but it’s been a whole mess.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that, while Car Thing was always a limited device, the company’s decision is leaving the device as genuine e-waste.

That was inevitable, though.

As has been revealed by many digging into Car Thing, Spotify has been selling an underpowered piece of hardware the whole time. @MarcelD505 on Twitter/X, a developer who also helped put full Android builds on the Rabbit R1, was tinkering with the device and found that it had merely 512MB of RAM on board. It was possible to mess with the device to show web views of the Spotify web player among some other things, but that was about it.

It locks up shortly after it loads pic.twitter.com/jc4U6dOn63
— Marcel (@MarcelD505) June 4, 2024

Technically speaking, the device is already pretty open-source, too. This was detailed by Josh Hendrickson, former ReviewGeek editor-in-chief, who took to Twitter/X and YouTube to showcase that Spotify has already posted some key source code for the device to GitHub, and also points out that the Amlogic chip powering the device makes modification rather easy.

The problem in the end is that Spotify Car Thing is just an incredibly underpowered device. Hendrickson adds that, alongside the 512MB of RAM, the device has just 4GB of storage and a “weak” Amlogic processor.

That means that it’d be impossible for Spotify Car Thing to run a recent version of Android. As of 2022’s Android 13, the minimum requirement for memory is 2GB of RAM, while Google apparently requires devices to have 16GB of storage. Theoretically, through the open-source nature of Android, it’d be possible to stretch those requirements, but there’s no way the Car Thing, which makes up merely 25% of the minimum requirement, would be able to handle it.

Spotify Car Thing was designed for one very specific purpose which, to a certain extent, means it was e-waste from the start. It was inevitable that Spotify would either end support for the product eventually or that the company’s requirements for the product would outpace its measly hardware.

It’s still entirely possible that some use cases could be developed for Spotify Car Thing, but it seems unlikely anything particularly capable will be coming – certainly not Android.