> The first is that all of these in-car systems are pretty dated even after a couple of years.
CarPlay can't really get out of date any more than iOS can get out of date. It's just a software push. The main problem with the stereo in my car is that not everything is in CarPlay, so you have this sort of absurd situation where CarPlay is supposedly just one function of many, when obviously FM radio should just be an app icon in CarPlay, and the audio settings should be an app in CarPlay, and so on.
CarPlay is the OS and the stereo unit also has its own OS, so CarPlay is basically like running an emulated OS on another computer. That's obviously very silly.
It’s a little silly, but it avoids the complexity of the car needing to describe every feature to CarPlay. It’s very hard to create an abstraction that allows for any capability, setting, message to be displayed and interacted with.
For instance, some 4x4’s have 2D inclinometers. Modern trucks have all sorts of crazy optimizations for towing.
Requiring CarPlay to understand and adopt new car-specific features gets crazy.
Making CarPlay a system that runs apps provided by the car is also crazy complex.
I have no doubt we’re heading that direction, but it is such a more complicated system for marginal benefit that it’s not surprising we’re stuck at a plateau where it works for 80% of scenarios.
It needs to get there quick. The golden goose is EV range. If your phone doesn't know when you need to recharge your batteries, Apple Maps and the rest are functionally useless.
Well actually ... just make an app that talks to some API in the car's system. You'll of course have to do it for both phone OSes, but it seems quite doable.
You don't want a bunch of different car API system, you'd have to deal with so many issues like large (ongoing) investment and support from Apple and Google. Maybe you could get support for some things like AC control via Matter but car manufacturers would struggle to get proprietary features supported.
You just need car specific app icons to appear inside of the Apple and Google UIs. Since Cars reach EOL you don't want infotainment system to have to depend on iOS or Android SDKs/APIs since those will change and the cars will stop getting updates. You want a very loose coupling between the car and the mobile device.
To me that means progressive web apps (PWA). All it needs is some type of registry/discovery mechanism (that isn't Cloud based). You make the connection between your car and mobile device, the local app registry is scanned and the PWAs are installed.
The dash screen really should be integrated into the OBD system so you can read codes etc without a seperate code reader. It doesn't seem that hard to do.
CarPlay can't really get out of date any more than iOS can get out of date. It's just a software push. The main problem with the stereo in my car is that not everything is in CarPlay, so you have this sort of absurd situation where CarPlay is supposedly just one function of many, when obviously FM radio should just be an app icon in CarPlay, and the audio settings should be an app in CarPlay, and so on.
CarPlay is the OS and the stereo unit also has its own OS, so CarPlay is basically like running an emulated OS on another computer. That's obviously very silly.