Everyone likes listening to music in their car, so it’s little surprise that Spotify had a Car View mode, allowing users to jam out to their favorite tracks more easily (and, more importantly, safely) while driving. All good things must come to an end, though, and we’re gathered here today to pay our respects to Car View, as Spotify has tragically killed the feature off — and users with cars are, understandably, very angry about it.
Concerned Spotify users have been posting to a thread on its community forums, complaining that Car View, which would typically show up in Settings, was not appearing on their device anymore, causing the app to default to the main play view instead of the driver-friendly interface. A Spotify forum moderator arrived to offer some context on that, confirming that Car View is dead:
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.
Spotify recently launched a new piece of hardware for drivers. We hope the Car Thing isn’t going to be the only replacement to Car View, because making people buy an $80 add-on to give them access to functionality they already had isn’t great. We also didn’t like it a lot.
Users are complaining in the thread, and we can’t blame them for it. Aside from making empty promises that it’s working on better alternatives, Spotify suggests a handful of workarounds, like using the Google Assistant to listen to music, which would be unnecessary if the app had a proper, you know, car mode.
If you’re in the US and you rely on Car View, maybe now’s the time to either buy a Car Thing or move to another streaming app.
Thanks: Yuri Vidal
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