Why Dedicated App Stores Are Coming to Cars

Tier 1 automotive supplier Visteon is laying the groundwork for car companies to build their own app stores for the digital cockpit products the company provides. This creates the opportunity for these OEMs to capture both commissions from the app developers and customer data on the users.

To get more insight into this emerging market, Design News spoke with Beyza Sariglu, Vice President of Digital Cockpit and Connected Services at Visteon, to get her views on how this will work and what the potential benefits are.

Q: Consumers already get apps from the Apple Store or Google Play, so why would automakers go to the effort to create their own proprietary app stores?

Beyza Sariglu: As the devices used at home became more digital like digital watches, smartphones, and smart TVs, consumers are starting to expect similar digital experiences inside the car, inside the cockpit. As you know, smartphones and smart TVs all come with app stores now. As the consumer sees that the car is becoming more digital, cars are becoming more “cell phones on wheels,” “computers on wheels” and they're expected to also see app stores inside the car.

With smartphone projection technology, of course, the user experiences in the cockpit are also changing. It's becoming more connected and continuously updating. The demand is for the adoption of the CarPlay and Android Auto for the projection technologies that we are familiar with. These are becoming a standard inside the vehicle, inside most cockpits, and OEMs seek differentiation through additional integrated digital technologies like human-machine interface (HMI) features that initiate interface features primarily to set themselves apart from their competition and also from Big Tech because Big Tech is also becoming our competitor in a sense.

Q: How will Visteon help OEMs create these app stores?

Beyza Sariglu: We have an AllGo-branded App Store that we have been working on and now we have a product that's ready to go to market. It's software as a product. It's an Android-based app store enabling our own customers to differentiate by offering a customized integrated app store in the vehicle in addition to the app stores that the user can access via smartphone projection technology.

In-car app stores are more convenient, and they can provide a seamless experience because you don't have to go through the hassle of connecting your phone. This is number one, and our OEM customers can white label the app store that we are providing so that they can promote their brand. We see that personalization is creating an emotional bond between the brand and the drivers and customization is taking it a step further, going even deeper with the user interface.

They can offer model-specific layouts and new content for different vehicles. And by having their own integrated app stores they can also capitalize on the monetization potential of these apps and services. You can access the use of the App Store and start learning more about the users’ preferences as well because [OEMs] own that user-specific data in the apps.

Q: Why should app developers create apps for carmakers’ own app stores?

Beyza Sariglu: What's in it for them is that they get access to another channel to reach a pool of growing customers. From a value proposition perspective, the digital cockpit is a very complex large system and it has multiple domains. It has a direct user interaction with the greatest potential to impact that user experience inside the vehicle. Inside the digital cockpit, the user's journey starts with either a touch of a screen or a voice command and then goes to the electronics with connected services all the way to the cloud and back. The digital cockpit system includes multiple subsystems, multi-display systems, cockpit electronics, as well as connected services, which include over-the-air updates and the app store.

And all these subsystems need to work in perfect harmony to deliver the best user experience. Within Visteon, we understand the digital cockpit as a system. And we designed it in a holistic way by carefully selecting relevant technologies so that we can provide an optimized system with the best performance including our app store.

Our system of understanding basically combined with years of experience designing and launching these digital cockpits is enabling us to make our solutions more fit for the market. And we are currently in discussions with multiple interested OEMs and ecosystem partners as well worldwide around the globe. We are providing evaluation licenses as we speak to our customers and so far the initial feedback we have collected is very promising for our product.

Q: It's an Android-based system so would Android applications be easy to put into your app store?

Beyza Sariglu: We provide a safe and convenient developer console and we also have an OEM portal so that they can add content. Developers need their own console to design the app and make the app available in our app store. And then we do have a portal that we offer to the OEMs.

Once the app is available, through our administrator portal, we put it through a quality assurance process with our quality assurance team, validating these individual apps to make sure they will provide a good user experience on the screens inside the vehicle depending on the size and the resolution. And then once it passes through these quality assurance checks, we make it available for the OEM to deploy the app to the desired vehicle fleet in the desired region, so they have full control.

Q: Is there the potential for OEMs to offer app developers lower commissions on their app stores to make them more attractive?

Beyza Sariglu: From a commercial perspective, the possibility is there.

Q: How many apps do you expect to have in the Visteon AllGo app store at launch?

Beyza Sariglu: It's not so much about how many apps you want to launch, you know, with respect to an app store inside the inside the vehicle. It's more about the relevant apps, you know, while you're driving, what kind of apps. Also, if you're a driver versus if you're a passenger in the car, they may have a desire to use different apps right? If you have a large screen in front of you with an integrated App Store, from a driver perspective, we see that they're primarily interested in entertainment, you know, streaming apps like audio books or music, like Pandora or Spotify.

They're interested in navigation apps, navigation map services, and location-based services. So this is getting a lot of attention. If they're driving an EV, they're interested in charging-related apps. Where are the charging stations? Route optimization is a good topic, especially for charging stations where there are multiple routes available. This is a high-value-added service or app that they would like to have access to. So it is more than the number of apps.

Q: What will be the timing of this rollout?

Beyza Sariglu: So we're basically ready to go to market this year. In 2023, towards the mid to end of 2023. So we're actively engaging our customers and collecting feedback from their initial trials and tryouts.