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      GM justifies decision to ditch Apple CarPlay due to stability issues

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 13 December - 16:38

    A cadillac lyriq infotaiment screen showing Apple CarPlay running

    Enlarge / The 2023 Cadillac Lyriq had an extremely good CarPlay implementation. But that's gone from GM EVs for MY2024 onward. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

    Few things have improved the state of in-car infotainment more than the advent of the phone casting interfaces from Apple and Google. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto let you run navigation or audio apps on your phone and interact with them via the car's native infotainment screen , avoiding the need to handle your phone while driving.

    That's why General Motors' decision to ditch CarPlay and Android Auto from new EVs from model year 2024 onward has been greeted with such dismay .

    GM has rolled out a new infotainment platform across its new electric vehicles called Unifi. Built on the Android Automotive OS —not to be confused with the Android Auto phone casting system—a build we used in a model year 2023 Cadillac Lyriq featured the most complete implementation of CarPlay we've yet experienced, making GM's decision to ditch the systems even more frustrating.

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      As some carmakers run from Apple CarPlay, Porsche embraces it

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 4 October - 16:23 · 1 minute

    A Porsche Cayenne infotainment screen showing the My Porsche app

    Enlarge / Porsche is the first automaker to expose car functions like climate and lighting via Apple's automaker toolkit for CarPlay. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

    Porsche provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Jose and four nights in a hotel so we could attend Rennsport Reunion 7 at Laguna Seca. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

    The introduction of Apple CarPlay in 2016 was a game-changer. Until then, connecting your phone to your car meant bothering with Bluetooth, and if you wanted to use a smartphone navigation app, you probably needed some kind of phone holder clipped to an air vent or suction-cupped to the dashboard. Being able to cast your phone's screen to the car's infotainment system turned out to be extremely popular, and by 2020, it was a feature that almost half of all new car buyers wanted .

    This has not sat well with every automaker; in March of this year, General Motors made headlines —and generated a lot of comments—when it announced it was killing off support for casting interfaces (both CarPlay and Android Auto) from its future products. But where GM saw a threat, Porsche saw an opportunity. And now it has built a new iOS app, making use of an Automaker toolkit provided by Apple. This little-known feature is only offered to OEMs and allows them freedom beyond the restrictive user interface guidelines laid down by Apple.

    Porsche's customer research found that the overwhelming majority of its customers have iPhones and prefer using them for things like navigation. "Obviously, you have to switch back and forth to control some features around media, for example, some more specific features around climate," explained Cyril Dorsaz, principal product manager at Porsche Digital. "And ultimately, we learned through customer research that this is something that our customers are not really happy with."

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      Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,” Mozilla Foundation says

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 September, 2023 - 15:41

    the interior of a car with a lot of networking icons overlayed on the image

    Enlarge / Your car's maker can collect data on you from many different sources. (credit: Getty Images)

    Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings , stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

    Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?

    While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not.

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      GM kills more than CarPlay support, it kills choice

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 31 March, 2023 - 22:05 · 1 minute

    Apple CarPlay screenshot showing Devo's freedom of choice playing

    Enlarge / Use your freedom of choice. (credit: Apple)

    A long while back, Toyota told me it didn't want to give up interior real estate to Apple’s CarPlay. The automaker felt that losing that space to the tech company would be a huge mistake. Fast forward a few years, and after what I assume were some internal struggles, it caved and now you can get CarPlay and Android Auto on your fancy new Highlander, Prius, Tacoma, or Camry. It seemed like a silly decision had been reversed. Now it’s GM’s turn to go down the same path.

    Today, news dropped that GM would be phasing out CarPlay support in future EVs . In its partnership with Google, it hopes that all the features you get from mirroring your iPhone can be replaced with an Android Automotive feature . GM, like Toyota before it, wants to control the digital real estate in its vehicles. It’s a revenue-based and walled-garden (ironically against Apple) decision that will cost them.

    Software-driven vehicles should be about choice. Instead, GM is making a short-sighted decision based on a trickle of revenue under the guise of better integration. Owning all the data that a vehicle generates while driving around could be a great source of cash. The problem is potential customers have become accustomed to choosing which device they use to navigate, chat, text, and rock out within their vehicle. They’ve grown weary of being mined for data at the expense of their choice and they’re really not all that keen on in-car subscription services .

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      GM confirms it’s dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from 2024 EVs

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 31 March, 2023 - 17:27

    2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV dashboard

    Enlarge / When Chevrolet launches the new Blazer EV later this year it will be GM's first new car to lack CarPlay or Android Auto. (credit: General Motors)

    In surprising car news today, we've learned that General Motors is planning to drop support for both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from new electric vehicles it plans to launch in the next few years. The decision won't affect any GM vehicles already on the market, nor will it apply to gasoline- or diesel-powered GM vehicles in the coming years—just EVs.

    "As we scale our EVs and launch our Ultifi software platform, we can do more than ever before with in-vehicle technologies and over-the-air updates. All of this is allowing us to constantly improve the customer experience we can offer across our brands," said Edward Kummer, GM's chief digital officer.

    GM told Ars that it's moving away from phone projection to offer customers a more integrated solution that sees Google Maps, Google Assistant, Audible, Spotify, and other applications run natively on its cars' infotainment systems.

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      Apple’s “next generation” of CarPlay plans to take over every screen in your car

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 7 June, 2022 - 15:36

    Apple detailed significant updates to its CarPlay platform at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday.

    During its keynote presentation, Apple gave what it termed a "sneak peek" of the "next generation" of the CarPlay standard, which allows iPhone users to control and view phone-based apps through their car's dashboard. The company says the update will see CarPlay more deeply integrate with a car's hardware, allowing it to display info across multiple screens in a host vehicle at a time when more and more cars are integrating more and more displays.

    The idea, it would seem, is to make CarPlay into something closer to a whole-car interface, not just the phone-mirroring infotainment system it is today.

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