BigZ
Member
Worth reading even if you never owned one, because the pattern applies to every box under your TV. Spotify stopped making Car Thing in July 2022, five months after it went on general sale in the US at 89.99 dollars, and took a 31 million euro charge doing it. Then on December 9, 2024 it remotely made the remaining units non-operational and told owners to recycle them. Not end of support. Working hardware switched off from a server.
A free open source firmware called Mira 1.0 has now brought the thing back. Flash it over USB-C from a computer, tether the device to a phone over Bluetooth or a computer over USB for internet, sign into Spotify, and you get playback controls, the physical dial, the four presets, album art, lyrics, podcasts with synced transcripts and device selection. It adds its own Hey Mira voice control and pairs multiple phones. No companion app, no extra account, no subscription. It is still Spotify only, it wipes the original software, and the developers admit it can be awkward waking from sleep and does not always reconnect over Bluetooth.
The reason this belongs here rather than in a car audio thread is the precedent. Streaming boxes and smart TVs are the same arrangement with a nicer screen. The apps are licensed, the certificates expire, and the decision to stop honouring your hardware sits with somebody else entirely. Most of us have already had a streamer lose a major app while the hardware itself worked fine.
The difference is that a dead app leaves you a box you can repurpose. A remote kill leaves you nothing. Which of your devices would actually survive its maker deciding it was finished?
A free open source firmware called Mira 1.0 has now brought the thing back. Flash it over USB-C from a computer, tether the device to a phone over Bluetooth or a computer over USB for internet, sign into Spotify, and you get playback controls, the physical dial, the four presets, album art, lyrics, podcasts with synced transcripts and device selection. It adds its own Hey Mira voice control and pairs multiple phones. No companion app, no extra account, no subscription. It is still Spotify only, it wipes the original software, and the developers admit it can be awkward waking from sleep and does not always reconnect over Bluetooth.
The reason this belongs here rather than in a car audio thread is the precedent. Streaming boxes and smart TVs are the same arrangement with a nicer screen. The apps are licensed, the certificates expire, and the decision to stop honouring your hardware sits with somebody else entirely. Most of us have already had a streamer lose a major app while the hardware itself worked fine.
The difference is that a dead app leaves you a box you can repurpose. A remote kill leaves you nothing. Which of your devices would actually survive its maker deciding it was finished?
