DeskThing Aims to Keep Spotify From Trashing the World's Car Things

Spotify is preparing to turn every Car Thing it ever sold into e-waste, but an open-source project dubbed DeskThing wants to stop that happening — by turning the soon-to-be-bricked in-car audio streaming gadgets into a more general-purpose device.

Spotify launched the Car Thing in 2021 as a dedicated streaming device for in-vehicle use. Component shortages and low sales, though, put paid to the product just a year after it launched — and in March this year the company announced it would pull server support for the device on December 9, 2024, a move that will render the few Car Things the company managed to sell completely useless.

That's where DeskThing, brought to our attention by Liliputing, comes in. The open-source project aims to keep Car Things out of landfill by making them usable again — not necessarily as a Spotify client but as a more general-purpose device. "It currently expands on the Car Thing's original functionality," says pseudonymous project creator "Riprod," "by removing the need for a Bluetooth connection to a mobile device, adding local audio support (which enables the Car Thing to report information from other sources), and providing weather reporting."

There's a catch, however: in order for any of this to work it requires the Car Thing to be connected to a computer, hence the "Desk" part of "DeskThing" — turning it into, effectively, a secondary means of interacting with the computer you already have. The project's roadmap, though, aims to lift this restriction in order to make the Car Thing usable with other devices include Android smartphones and Raspberry Pi single-board computers — to, in Riprod's words, "get this project to where the Car Thing should have been at release."

" I'm really trying my hardest to make the DeskThing an easy entry point for beginners to mess around with real tools to build their own desk-side applications," Riprod explains. "What started as a hobby project has turned into a passion project. We hope to continue to improve the DeskThing and make it a staple in the lives of our users. We hope to continue to add new features and improve the user experience, making the DeskThing a better product for everyone. Take back the Car Thing."

DeskThing downloads are available on the project's website; source code is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.