[petarb]

It’s interesting to see how a lot of new gas cars have Apple CarPlay / Android Auto but all of the new EV cars are going towards custom OS which essentially leads to worse user experiences for manufacturers who aren’t well versed in software.

[SkyPuncher]

It's honestly insane.

CarPlay does everything I want and the best part is it just works. A large part of that "it just works" is the fact that it's all based directly on my phone.

* That restaurant we just decided to go to. Already in navigation. AND! the maps are all current with road closures/traffic issues.

* The music that I was playing, it just keeps going

* The garage door opener/lock/etc that I just added to HomeKit - automatically pops us.

[lotsofpulp]

The best part is I do not have to worry about a third party vendor getting access to my smartphone’s data.

For better or worse, the smartphone is a vault of almost everything about a person, including the ability to impersonate them.

Obviously, Apple and Google already have access to all of this, but I see no reason to let yet another entity have it.

[shuckles]

CarPlay is essentially a form of AirPlay, so the car is receiving a video stream from your phone, not data. (Of course, they could try to extract data from the video stream, but I doubt they have the technical skills to do that in the near future.)

[outside1234]

Exactly. This is one of those terrible decisions that GM will have to retract. The only question is when.

There is no way they are going to be able to compete with Apple or Google. Literally the worst software engineer at either of those companies is better than anyone GM has.

Will make an interesting Harvard MBA case study.

[csdvrx]

> It's honestly insane. CarPlay does everything I want and the best part is it just works. A large part of that "it just works" is the fact that it's all based directly on my phone.

The insanity goes both ways: I refuse to use a cellphone, so I will not buy a car that has Android or Apple stuff.

Hopefully I'll have other options than this $130k Cadillac, but it's good to know some automakers cater to my preferences too.

> That restaurant we just decided to go to. Already in navigation. AND! the maps are all current with road closures/traffic issues

Funny enough, getting a GPS without auto updates and offering a full offline experience is now a premium, but I'm happy to pay for the exact opposite of what you want: a GPS without auto navigation / user tracking / not being happy to work with old maps if I decide it should (customer is king, except for apps!)

[scottyg66]

> The insanity goes both ways: I refuse to use a cellphone, so I will not buy a car that has Android or Apple stuff.

I think you are firmly in the minority here and probably not the market they are building for. I bet much less than 1% of people who will buy a car in the next year refuse to use a cell phone.

[lotsofpulp]

> The insanity goes both ways: I refuse to use a cellphone, so I will not buy a car that has Android or Apple stuff.

FYI, a car that supports CarPlay/Android Auto and a car that does not is indistinguishable to the person who does not connect a phone to the car. It is just an interface that allows your phone to use the touchscreen, but if you do not connect a phone, it continues to work.

[SkyPuncher]

> I refuse to use a cellphone, so I will not buy a car that has Android or Apple stuff.

Then, you're also not buying an EV it sounds like... All of these fancy headunits require a cell phone modem....

-----

CarPlay is entirely optional. Your headunit will have all of the basic still built in.

[csdvrx]

> Then, you're also not buying an EV it sounds like

Then I won't?

Instead, for a fraction of the price I may get a nice second hand muscle car, with no feature I don't want to be present. It may even have an old school CD player, I like retro :)

[CamperBob2]

That's great, but this thread is about something else entirely. No one at GM (or anywhere else, apparently) can make recurring revenue from you, so your needs and interests will be even less relevant to automakers than those of the rest of us.

Sucks, but that's how things are shaping up. Too late for the proverbial pebbles to vote.

[csdvrx]

> your needs and interests will be even less relevant to automakers than those of the rest of us

It's more of a want than a need. Otherwise, I agree, but not being able to buy an EV was presented as a bad thing?

There are fewer alternatives than I'd like, but there're still plenty to get the basic "car" need satisfied with my special "no phone use required" preference.

[gopher2000]

> I refuse to use a cellphone

Like at all? That immediately puts you in a pretty niche category.

[csdvrx]

> Like at all? That immediately puts you in a pretty niche category.

Like at all I guess? Or at least least 99% of the time?

I'm not opposed to the idea owning a cellphone: I can have one, if it's without a cellphone plan and spends most of the time powered off inside a drawer.

Then, as long as I'm not forced to interact with it say more than once a month, it's fine.

I guess this technically doesn't qualify for the "not at all" since I sometimes use a cellphone to run magisk to root my android ebook

[elsonrodriguez]

They want a shorter revenue cycle via recurring services.

What they're missing is that I don't stream my music from GMTunes, I don't store my photos on GMPhotos, I don't have my files on GMCloud, and I don't have easy access to all of this from my GMPhone, GMPad, GMBook, and GMWatch.

They either fundamentally don't understand why people want Carplay or Android Auto, or have delusions that they can become a bigger ecosystem than Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

If they are unsatisfied with the recurring revenue they currently get via selling car, parts, and electric charging partnerships, maybe they should start pivoting towards public transit.

[greenthrow]

This isn't really true except for Rivian and Tesla, which as start ups, wrote their own stack and want to fully control it.

GM is moving to Google Automotive and doesn't want to enable Carplay or Android Auto, but Google is already in there deep. No other legacy manufacturers have announced plans to take away Carplay/Android Auto. Quite a few are basing their systems on Android Automotive, though (BMW, Volvo/Polestar, GM as mentioned, off the top of my head), so even if you don't use a Google phone, Google is going to have your data.

There is no difference here between ICE vehiclws and BEVs, other than the two startups I mentioned.

[lotsofpulp]

If a car with Google Automotive has CarPlay, how would Google get data from the iPhone? Is CarPlay not just an interface so your phone can display things on a bigger touchscreen?

[greenthrow]

Even if the car is using CarPlay it can still report everything it knows about your location to Google. That translates to where you go at what times, etc.

[hedora]

At a minimum, it will pull location and anything the drivetrain knows about.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if it also somehow ended up MITM'ing / screen scraping / OCR'ing apple services.

The only solution at this point is legislation.