[echelon]

Sounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch.

These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.

Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.

Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

[stephen_g]

That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!

Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.

[greentea23]

It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.

[stephen_g]

That’s nothing to do with the OP’s comment, and ignores the second part which I pointed out too (that nobody is forcing you to use this optional feature that most people want), so swing and a miss on two points…

The OP’s argument is that lots of people wanting CarPlay is evidence some kind of monopolistic anti-competitive behaviour by Apple, which is nonsense. Nothing in your comment relates addresses the argument or the rebuttal!

[majormajor]

Seems like, if anything, the right action for regulators would be to enforce car manufacturers to not refuse to support existing consumer connectivity protocols... or at least not unless they can come up with something at least as good. And definitely something that isn't "pay us a data subscription so we can track you too while you use a crappier re-implementation of what your phone can already do."

Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.

[numpad0]

What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.

[thorbutt]

This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment

As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary

[bluGill]

As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)

[dgacmu]

Consumers having a preference is not ok?

I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.

[al_borland]

Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.

[Telaneo]

The customers want to be able to control the infotainment system, by functionally replacing it with something completely different, since the defaults are garbage across the industry. Both Apple and Google have outdone every single carmaker in what is supposedly their own game (or at least their own arena). Can't blame them for that.

[pertymcpert]

What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?

[Jtsummers]

> Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

To quote a wise man:

>> We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.

>>We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473

[echelon]

These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act.

These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market.

Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies.

Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise.

Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping?

How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over.

Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils.

Google and Apple are not good companies.

You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.

[CamperBob2]

You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right?

You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple.

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...

[rufius]

Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay.

What’s your point?

[asveikau]

Android Auto is also a thing.

[aetch]

Do you understand how headunits work and have you ever sat in a car? It doesn’t sound like it since you think cars are forced to use CarPlay.

[stalfosknight]

What monopoly?