Last year Google announced the Car Ready Mobile Apps program, in short, Carma. This is a program to bring existing mobile apps to car users of Android Automotive OS without much effort.
In Google’s words:
Car Ready apps are large screen compatible and are enabled while the car is parked, with potentially no additional work. While these apps may not have car-specific features, users can experience the app just as they would on any large screen Android device.
Last month, we started seeing the first bunch of apps released under the categories of browsers, video and gaming as initially announced by Google.
It is a bit early to reach any strong conclusions, but I think that by analyzing Google Play we could learn a bit about the current app development trends in the automotive ecosystem.
All available AAOS apps are currently listed under this AAOS explore link on Google Play. With a little bit of scripting and some data curation we can extract some relevant figures.
| Published AAOS apps on Google Play | 214 |
| Car Ready apps | 92 |
| Other app categories (mostly templates) | 122 |
For example, we can count the total amount of apps supporting the automotive form factor (AAOS). After a few years of public AAOS releases, we can observe that the amount of apps for AAOS is still quite limited. This might be one of the reasons why Google decided to create the Car Ready Mobile Apps program. Like this they can push a bit this ecosystem and bring more developers without much friction. Is this a good strategy though? Time will say. What is clear for now is that if the amount of apps is the goal, the Carma program so far has been quite successful. If my numbers are right, 92 new apps has been published in the games, video and browsers categories. It’s remarkable how much Carma accomplished so quickly, given the longer lifespan of AAOS.
From these 92 new apps, most of them are games as shown in the table below.
| Games | 73 |
| Video | 14 |
| Browser | 5 |
Games cope the top of the board with 73 apps. This comes as no surprise since lately we have seen car OEMs announcing partnerships with game developers. Some examples of these partnerships are BMW & AirConsole and VW & AirConsole. Most of these apps are casual games to literally occupy the idle times while seating in a car. Flappy bird anyone?
In the video streaming category we can find apps from big players like Amazon Prime and Youtube. It is interesting to see how apps from other media producers start to occupy this space: Red Bull TV, Canal+, RTL+, etc.
In the browser category, we have 5 different apps, but in reality they are different versions of two browsers, i.e., Google Chrome and Vivaldi. The case of Vivaldi is interesting, because they offer 3 different APKs:
- A generic version with package id com.vivaldi.browser.automotive.
- A Renault version with package id com.vivaldi.browser.automotive.renault.
- A Polestar version with package id com.polestar.vivaldi.production.android.
I haven’t analyzed the different packages, but it would be good to know why Vivaldi went this route instead of consolidating the Google Play listing within a single package. Probably this comes out of some initial collaboration and branding strategy. Specially since Vivaldi has been the first browser in AAOS developed by a 3rd party.
Talking about branding, we start observing app portfolios listed by OEMs accounts. Polestar published under the developer name “Polestar Performance AB”:
Renault does it under the developer id “Renault Group”:
See the HERE Navigation app? This is probably another example of branding and we will likely see other versions of HERE for other OEMs. This is an interesting trend for developers, because as you can see OEMs like differentiation.
Speculating a bit about the OEM app portfolios, I believe that car OEMs have the power to white list which apps can target their vehicles. I think Google still does the app reviews for them, but OEMs have a way to bypass the release process. This way 3rd party developers collaborating directly with OEMs can offer these specific versions. This is a bit similar to some extend to how other white-label app stores do. They basically can review apps and present them to the OEMs, who have the final word about which apps hit the specific vehicle models. In my eyes, all this review process is a very opaque strategy for independent developers. App stores and OEMs should work together to improve this if they really want to have a healthy app ecosystem where app developers can contribute with their products.
Coming back to the lack of transparency in the Google Play app review process, I found some interesting apps that caught my attention. An example is nSpire. The screenshots used there depict mostly a demo app without much functionality. Once installed, we can confirm that the app is basically used for demoing some functionality. Given that Google forces developers to define the app category in AAOS and this app doesn’t seem to match any of the existing categories at the time of writing, I honestly don’t know how this app made it through the review process.
Another app example is BCN3D, which is according to their own description: “An AR app designed to simplify and enhance the maintenance process for BCN3D 3D printers.” I tried to install it in AAOS, but it wasn’t possible. I guess this is a mistake in the Google Play listing for AAOS apps. In fact, the app doesn’t even show when searching it via the Google Play app in AAOS.
Conclusion
It is very early to make any hard statements, but we can be sure that the Carma program is Google’s attempt to grow the AAOS app ecosystem by reducing the amount of effort needed to bring existing mobile apps to this form factor. After just one month, we can already observe the impact of the program.
App quantity
The amount of apps is still quite limited in comparison to mobile, but honestly I don’t think car drivers need such an amount of apps given that their needs are more limited to some specific use cases. Nevertheless, we can see the massive growth in entertainment apps supported by the Carma program. This imposes new challenges for app developers, who see how the competition increases. At the same time, it makes it harder for app stores to handle the catalogue of apps, forcing them to think about alternative ways of presenting the data to drivers. It doesn’t make any sense to mix parked mode apps with driving mode apps for example.
App quality
How will Google guarantee that the apps offered in cars are still relevant and work as expected? Given that the review process for templated apps is already quite cumbersome and opaque, I wonder what’s going to happen when more and more apps are flooding the Google Play store with parked apps. Will this group of apps follow a similar review process to the one in mobile? In theory, since parked apps cannot be used while driving, the safety restrictions can be relaxed a bit.
Most of these arguments refer to Google Play, but I hope 3rd party app stores take note as well and try to improve the processes for developers and the experience of users / drivers.