Your Car Doesn’t Care What Phone You Use

Parrot RNB 6 This auto infotainment unit from Parrot has maps, voice controls, maintenance alerts, and it can stream and record video from any front and rear cameras you attach. Best of all, it supports both Android Auto and Apple's CarPlay out of the box—anyone in your family can connect to it regardless of what kind of phone they own, and your car's in-dash system won't determine whether your next mobile is an iPhone or a Moto X. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Buying a smartphone today feels less like choosing a gadget than picking sides in an endless feudal conflict; your allegiance to House Apple or House Android can shape most of your tech purchases thereafter. But there’s one place where an unlikely ceasefire in the platform wars has emerged: the dashboard of your car.

Apple and Google’s race take over your hardtop was probably inevitable, even before Eddy Cue showed off the germ of what would later become CarPlay at WWDC in 2013. The proprietary infotainment systems automakers have foisted on customers for years have ranged from annoying to abominable, each with their own proprietary shortcomings. It’s gotten so bad that, according to a recent Consumer Reports study, infotainment systems and their trappings cause more reliability issues than any other part of the car in the first year of ownership. In the most extreme case, more than one in five new Infiniti Q50 sedan buyers experienced issues. That car is like 40 grand.

Let the Experts Do It

Handing off that responsibility, then, to people who actually understand software and the finer points of UI makes all the sense in the world. Better to give your customers a solid and familiar experience than to make them learn a new, uneven one at 60mph.

What was less clear until recently, though, was how that implementation would play out, especially after Google announced its CarPlay rival, Android Auto, at its I/O developer conference last year. It was tempting, given how frequently Mountain View and Cupertino clash, to foresee a future in which your choice of smartphone didn’t just dictate your set-top box; it would be a major factor in deciding one of the biggest ticket purchases of your life.

Fortunately, and maybe miraculously, that future already has already turned out to be far less dire than it could have. More than half of the 32 automakers listed by Apple and Google as in-dash partners have already backed both CarPlay and Android Auto. Meanwhile, aftermarket pacesetters Pioneer and Parrot both recently showed off systems that can give your dumb jalopy Google Maps and Siri smarts alike.

A Fight That Nobody Really Wins

All of this nets out to automobiles being among the first truly operating system-agnostic gadgets we own, a coexistence that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago. That’s partly because there aren’t many technological limitations to bringing them together—both platforms spec out about the same, although Android Auto is a little more strict on size requirements—and, as Pioneer exec Ted Cardenas explained in an interview, because there’s little upside for tech titans to make the car a contested territory.

“I think both companies recognize that… in the context of either Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, the vehicle becomes an accessory to the device,” Cardenas said. “And when you start thinking about it in that context, the fight over the consumer necessarily wanting either an Apple device or an Android device has already been done at that point. They’re fine coexisting knowing that ultimately the consumer who’s using it will never see both. They’ll see one or the other.” In other words: Just because you have Android Auto in your car doesn’t mean you’ll ever know it’s there, much less let it lure you away from your iPhone 6.

But why have more all these major automakers, all of which have invested at least some money into their own infotainment systems, opened the door to Google and Apple? Simply put, they don’t want to risk alienatating potential customers by not offering the system that works with their phone. Take Ford. The next major update to its Sync infotainment platform—a mainstay since its introduction in 2007—will embrace CarPlay and Android Auto alike by the end of the year. While that could be read as a capitulation—Sync was such a sore spot that the automaker recently ditched Microsoft, its partner since the beginning, for BlackBerry’s QNX operating system—Ford infotainment guru Gary Jablonski insists that embracing all comers has been a priority for Sync since the very beginning.

“We don’t want the customer to base the choice of a $40,000 car on the $300 phone that they carry in their pocket,” Jablonski explained. “Our philosophy with Sync from day one has been about being device-agnostic and giving customers choice.” The real difficulty, says Jablonski, isn’t so much adoption as it is implementation.

“There’s a challenge between getting a customer into CarPlay because they want to go to Maps or listen to music on the iPhone, and to then get them out of CarPlay… You wouldn’t be using CarPlay to tune your radio or adjust your climate controls.” Making that switch elegant and intuitive is trickier than you’d think.

Early Days

Not to mention that for all the polish of iOS and Android, their vehicular equivalents are still first-generation products, likely to be in need of refinement. The hiccups of early adoption that are bearable in your living room become a little less so on I-95.

Jablonski downplayed those concerns, but it’s worth noting that CarPlay and Android Auto won’t launch day and date with Sync 3 (Ford anticipates they’ll be available as an OTA update within a few months of that), and that Ford is still promoting its AppLink infotainment feature on top of Apple and Google’s offerings.

This may also help explain why Toyota recently backed away from its CarPlay commitment, explaining to the New York Times that it “currently had no plans” to deploy it or Android Auto in the U.S., opting instead to focus on its existing, homegrown in-dash solution. Not to mention major automakers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz, who are on board with CarPlay but absent from the Android Auto roster.

So it’s not all perfect. There are still some land mines in the DMZ. But the fact that, within a year or so, you’ll be able to drive a car off the lot that not only doesn’t care what phone you own but actively works with whichever one you do (obligatory Windows Phone exception/apology here) is a remarkable, unprecedented joy.

Yes, you can dual boot a PC with a little determination and know-how. You can piece together Android/Apple harmony with Google apps and Chrome. But the flexibility we’re seeing in a car comes out of the box (or in this case, off the line). It’s seamless, built-in. It’s a respite from the otherwise exhausting, ongoing effort to make all the things you own acknowledge each others’ existence.

Is CarPlay and Android Auto shacking up in the same dashboard a harbinger of even more collaboration—or at least, accommodation—down the line? Not likely. But it’s still a welcome vision of an alternate universe, one in which our gadgets don’t just work; they work together.