Hopefully, Car Thing isn’t Spotify’s solution
Spotify killed its ‘Car View’ mode that offered a simplified playback control interface for drivers.
Earlier this week, several users noticed Car View was inexplicably missing from the app. Several people took to a Spotify community forum thread to ask what happened, and a Spotify forum moderator confirmed the feature was dead (spotted by Android Police):
“We can confirm that we’re retiring the car view feature. This however doesn’t mean we don’t want to improve on how our users listen to Spotify while driving. On the contrary, we’re actively exploring a variety of new ways to deliver the best in-car listening experience. Think of retiring car-view as something that needs to happen in an effort to make way for new innovations coming down the track.”
Unfortunately for Car View fans, this means you won’t have access to the interface anymore. Hopefully, Spotify’s “variety of new” in-car listening experiences don’t revolve around the Car Thing, a frankly silly piece of hardware only available in the U.S. It’s basically an $80 USD (about $102.12 CAD) device that does what Car View already did for free.
The Spotify moderator suggested a few possible alternatives people could use in place of Car View, including Google Assistant. While Google does have a few Assistant-based music voice control options baked into its apps (like Google Maps), these don’t really stack up to a dedicated car mode.
All that said, not everyone will miss Car View. I found the interface to be incredibly annoying, in part because no matter how many times I disabled it, the feature always seemed to come back and interrupt me. Although I’m not alone in that sentiment, it does seem like a lot of people will miss Car View too.
Source: Spotify Via: Android Police