I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.
We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.
They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.
They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.
Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay.
With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
Both infotainment and phones should be open to run the software users choose. The biggest problem with tech today is how everyone with control of some kind of choke point expects everyone else to pay them to “allow” the user to use anything that isn’t in the first party’s strategic interest.
We saw this when Apple violently crushed that Android-compatible iMessage solution a couple years ago. It was portrayed as that developer “hacking” Apple - not as the users of the iMessage service choosing a different client than Apple likes. This shift in thinking is wild.
Since the AT&T breakup the phone company was forced to allow customers to choose their client hardware (phones). Now in the modern day critical infrastructure, we’re back to the same old tricks where powerful parties (platform owners) want to dictate the hardware and software customers are allowed to use based purely on their own greedy interests.
Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition.
Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google.
Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive.
All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
I bet Google Maps pays for itself through ads alone. In addition Google Maps gains a lot of invaluable data from its users like new businesses, reviews, pictures, updated opening times, traffic data and more. So no Google Maps isn't really "free" it's paid for by its users with ads and free labor to improve the mapping data.
Having the users split between different navigation software is a worse user experience because the mapping data will be worse. So I welcome a monopoly in this case.
The hard work of mapping is done by the government in most countries and paid for by the tax payers. So you are just paying the car company to convert the mapping data you already paid for into their proprietary format.
> If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150.
That might be true, but it probably isn't. A larger company can spread the cost out over a larger number of customers, meaning the cost per customer is lower.
Then why are they making such terrible carplay systems?
Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market.
(DIN being a German standards body..)
