Don’t go installing AOSP on it, though
Spotify’s Car Thing is (or, rather, was) a peculiar device. It’s a dash-mounted device that lets you control your streaming experience easily while you’re cruising along, but that’s separate from your existing head unit and, at least at first, had a hefty $90 price point that made it a difficult purchase for many people. It’s cheaper than ever these days with stock dwindling down, but besides that, the killer thing about it is that it’s surprisingly moddable. And it’s even moreso now because some clever peope found a way to unlock the Car Thing’s bootloader.
Specifically, Nolen Johnson and Frédéric Basse have managed to unlock the Spotify Car Thing, which runs some funky Android fork, thanks to a newly-surfaced exploit that enables root access and ADB on the device and potentially opens the door for other mods including alternative firmware. The mod itself is pretty messy and it’s definitely not like unlocking any other Android device, but it’s doable nonetheless.
All you need is a Car Thing, a USB cable, and a 64-bit Linux-powered PC with libusb-dev installed. Oh, two parts guts to one part wit as well.
The fact that this weirdo device is unlockable and, thus, moddable is pretty coolseeing as buyers will logically want to keep it alive for as long as they possibly can beyond when official support sunsets.
Whether you’ll be able to install full-fat Android on it, though, is unlikely, at least for modern Android. The device comes equipped with just ~500MB of RAM, which hasn’t been an acceptable amount for Android machines since at least 2013 — and while the minimum RAM spec for the lightweight Android 10 Go edition is technically pegged at 512MB, devices with double the memory aren’t so breezy to deal with, either. For Android 13 Go edition, Google is requiring phone makers for at least 2GB of RAM.
All that said, this development will likely open up the doors for other mods and we’re definitely excited to see what can be done to the Car Thing over the coming months.
