Niklas Weiss is product owner of the BMW ConnectedDrive Store, incorporating BMW’s in-vehicle interface to the third-party app ecosystem. Before that he was part of BMW’s infotainment platform team, working as a community manager facilitating the work of internal app developers. Niklas is driven by the vision of shifting capabilities to the hand of developers, unleashing open innovation for cars by enabling third-parties to bring their own ideas and solutions to the automotive customers. He is an alumnus of the BMW Group’s Ph.D. program and holds a doctoral degree in Information Systems. In this context, Niklas researched the emergence of app ecosystems and the inherent design of associated app platforms.
Niklas Weiss
Product Owner App Store at BMW Group
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?