Spotify Car Thing

For today’s Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old, or Obsolete Device, I’m leaning pretty hard on that first descriptive word: I present to you the Spotify Car Thing, a short-lived device that was just too b̶e̶a̶u̶t̶i̶f̶u̶l̶ weird for this world!

Back in the heady days of 2021, music streaming service Spotify announced that it was entering the consumer hardware market: a slim little touch-screen Spotify controller to be mounted onto your car’s dashboard.

I was right in their target demographic: I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since the service first launched in the US, I use it constantly, and my car lacks Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. I jumped at the chance to order one, and once it arrived and I set it up in my car… I didn’t really like it that much. I’d already gotten used to just using my iPhone for music and navigation while mounted to the dashboard, and switching to the Car Thing resulted in a smaller screen and the loss of the navigation display. Bummer.

Spotify soon announced that they were discontinuing the Car Thing due to lackluster sales. It’s not surprising for unsuccessful products to be phased out, but Spotify went too far: not only were they discontinuing sales of the gadget, they were going to disable all existing Car Things, rendering them inoperable even for users who were perfectly happy with the device. Car Thing fans quickly organized a class action lawsuit, and Spotify was eventually forced to issue refunds.

After I figured out that the Car Thing didn’t really improve my in-car experience back in 2021, I dumped it in the back of my junk drawer and forgot about it… until this week when I was searching for something and stumbled across mine. On a whim I started looking around online, and was delighted to discover that some enterprising hackers have “jailbroken” the Car Thing and released multiple new operating systems for it, all of which expand its functionality far beyond Spotify’s original design.

I first tried out Nocturne, a new OS that restores and enhances the Car Thing’s role as a Spotify controller. Nocturne is very cool but I was hoping to go further, so I pivoted to an alternate OS called Desk Thing. With Desk Thing, the Car Thing becomes a more general-purpose gadget suited to use at home, able to control media playback on paired devices, display weather reports, and even play simple games like Pong using the large knob controller. Even better, there’s an image viewer app - perfect for my needs! I fired up my favorite graphic design program and threw together a custom Zscaler logo screen matching the Car Thing’s unique resolution (800x480), and within seconds it was displayed onscreen. Fun!

I’ll end this by wishing all my Zscaler peers and partners making their way to Las Vegas for our SKO event this coming week safe travels. Please drop a comment to share what tunes you’ll be rocking out to while you travel!