Traditionally, cars have been bubbles, disconnected from the rest of the user’s life. If you take the time, you might set up your home and work addresses to your navigation system and sync your phone’s address book. Some brands have offered ways to send data, like navigation directions, to their cars for quite some time already but all this is cumbersome and is quickly becoming an experiences not matching users’ expectations.
We expect a continuum between our devices. The smartphone revolution has ingrained this expectation to us. The idea of having to transfer your music to a new device to listen to it is now unimaginable. You expect your mobile browser to know your passwords for all the sites you use on your laptop as well as to know your browsing history and bookmarks. This precedence set by smartphones should be taken seriously in the automotive industry. There’s no reason to believe that the same won’t happen there.
Car manufacturers are waking up to the reality that their systems are now being compared to the other devices their customers are using like iPads and smartphones. A 5-year-old custom Linux system without any connection to the rest of the world just won’t do it anymore.
Both Apple and Google have created their own, easy solutions; the projected modes of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. These have become extremely popular and these systems are supported by a large majority of car manufacturers. But a projected mode can never be as integrated into the car’s experience as a well built integrated system.
In this light, it is not surprising that car manufacturers are flocking to integrating Android into their cars at a lower level than a projected mode. Volvo and Polestar might have been the first but they certainly won’t be the last.
Let’s look at some examples of continuum we’re expecting to work in cars:
I’m going to go to IKEA tomorrow. Let me check where the nearest one is and how I get there. A simple Google Maps search on my laptop will, of course, tell me.
Tomorrow, when I jump into my car, the very first suggestion for a navigation target is the same IKEA I searched for the day before on my laptop. This is happening without me having to send anything to the car, it’s fully automatic as the system knows what I’ve been searching for and a place in driving distance is likely a candidate for me actually driving there so it suggests it to me.
In some systems you can send targets to your car but there is a huge difference between 0 actions and 1 action you have to plan for.
Picking up people from the airport is a special kind of driving task. You don’t want to park for long as parking is expensive. You can’t quite know exactly when the people you’re picking up are available as their phones are in airplane mode during the flight. You also can’t be 100% certain that the planned location is going to be available as things tend to change at airports.
I’ve found a solution when using Android Auto. When I head off to the airport to pick up my parents I first start navigation on my Google Auto navigation. I then share the navigation progress live to my parents. As I do not know which of them will turn on their phone first, I do the sharing through our family group chat on Telegram.
In an older in-car system I’d be unlikely to be able to share my navigation progress but if I could, I would probably have to use SMS and send it to my parents separately. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but having your communication tools beyond just SMS on your fingertips really matters. You should not have to change the way you communicate just because you sit in your car.
Audiobooks are one of the best ways to make your commute useful or entertaining. But listening to an Audiobook takes much longer than a single trip to work. It is likely that you will want to continue the book on your mobile device, laptop or even on your smart speakers.
Forcing the user to manually remember where they were listening to the book is far from optimal. One of the most powerful features of the Polestar’s Android Automotive OS (AAOS) system is the presence of my Google Assistant and the same applications I use on my other devices.
Google knows me, the Google Assistant is present in every room of my home as well as on my phone and some of my laptops. My audio, podcast and video sources are all set up into the Assistant.
When I jump into my car I can simply utter “Hey Google, continue my audiobook” and no matter which book I was listening to or whether I was listening to it on a home speaker or on my phone last time, the book continues exactly where I stopped.
For app developers there are few things to consider when building their apps. If what you’re building can be useful in the in-car context you might want to bake that into your app development process in quite an early phase as it might impact your library choices and architecture approach even if you decide to leave the actual in-car implementation for later. Especially if you’re working with Android apps, you might want to consider some of the following points.
Are you using Google Services?
- Many old-school car manufacturers are hesitant to jump on board with Google and are creating AAOS versions that do not come with Google Services or Google Play Store. It remains to be seen how popular platforms and what the app distribution approach on these platforms will be but one thing is certain: If you depend on Google Services in the core of your apps, you automatically lock yourself out from any opportunity that might arise later.
- Amazon is coming to rear seat entertainment (RSE)
Amazon is going to be a significant player in the automotive domain. They already announced that they are entering the game by bringing their FireTV products as part of rear-seat entertainment. So targeting Amazon devices might be a good investment in the future.
- Car space will be more fragmented than phones but Android is the unifying factor
We will see many more app stores than we see on mobile at the moment. The systems are going to be more fragmented and supporting all of them will be difficult. You might have to pick your battles.
- Spotify as a shining example of how to make everything work
Spotify runs everywhere. And seamlessly so. You will have your playlists synchronised automatically and you can often even control other devices regardless which platform you are on. But Spotify are rich.Most app developers won’t be able to support everything no matter what. Still, looking at what Spotify has done makes sense. It is a great target to aspire towards.
My message to car manufacturers boils down to couple of points:
Users are not all using the same services. You won’t be able to support all of them by yourself.
- Not everyone is using Spotify for music. There are a lot of competing services that all evolve, add features and become better (or sometimes worse). Same applies to messaging platforms, navigation systems and video services. Taking it on yourself to build all of this for your cars is going to be impossible or at the very least costly. You could, of course, just look at the numbers and support only the most popular platforms. But you’re soon starting to block out potential customers if you go down that road.
- So make sure that 3rd parties can support your new systems. Follow standards, make things easy and transparent for developers.
Going with Google is understandable but needs to be carefully considered
- Google is not going to be making it easier to use Android without Google in the future. They have not done that on mobile either.
- Going without Google you take a big responsibility on yourself. You better be ready to carry that or find an experienced partner. Maintaining developer relations, building app stores and services that developers actually like to use are all going to be chicken-egg problems. Until you have enough vehicles on the road, investing time to support for your brand is not a wise investment for most devs. On the other hand, your system is going to compare poorly if it lacks a big portion of the most important software from 3rd parties.
- There are already other stores than Google. For example Amazon and Huawei, maybe one of these systems would work instead of building everything by yourself?
- There are alternatives to any Google services as well and my prediction is that there will be even more in the future. Google Assistant is far from being the only voice assistant that works well. Amazon’s Echo is in a very similar state. Building your own though, might be a herculean task that you should be careful to avoid if possible.
- It’s unlikely that people are going to make purchase decisions based solely on the infotainment system. But I see it becoming increasingly likely that an increasing number of people will start to make decisions not to purchase a vehicle of a specific brand due to bad in-car system experience or lack of continuum from outside the vehicle into the car cockpit.