CEO, Snapp Automotive
I used to be an Android developer, I now run couple of Android-related agency businesses.
Juhani Lehtimäki
Founder, Android Lead at Snapp Mobile. Android GDE.
The Future of 3rd Party App Ecosystems in Cars
● What do you see as the role of 3rd party apps in cars?
● What do you see as the biggest blocker for creating a strong ecosystem of 3rd party app developers for cars at the moment?
○ The elephant in the room: Google Play.
● Do cars need 3rd party apps?
● For app store providers - how do developers deploy apps into your stores? How do they know what cars they will end up in and how do they know that apps will work fine in the car?
● Number of cars, compared to mobile devices, is low. What is the incentive for app developers to spend time developing for cars?
○ How do you see monetisation in cars working?
○ How do you make sure users won’t have to double pay for the same app they’ve already purchased on their mobile devices?
○ List of past failures in creating an ecosystem is long: Microsoft, Amazon, etc. What are we doing differently?
● Can I enable ADB in my car in the future?
Talk Title
Android in Automotive, the Real Fragmentation
If you listened to the tech blogs (or Apple) in the early years of Android you were told that the platform was doomed because of something called “fragmentation”. To the bloggers, handling different software versions, camera hardware and screen sizes seemed impossible. But Android was built to handle all that and mobile phone manufacturers relied on Google and the platform design to manage and solve the issues.
10 years later the automotive industry is adopting Android as their platform of choice. The industry is facing the same fragmentation bugbear but this time it’s real.
In this talk I describe the state of the automotive industry and its complex relationship with Android when it comes to handling of 3rd party app ecosystems. I outline what I believe will happen next and what actions should and could be taken to change the somewhat bleak picture of the future of automotive for app developers.