GM Goes Deep With Apps — Call’s Them a “Sandbox With Wheels”

SBX sits down with Ste­fan Cross, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er at Gen­er­al Motors, to learn more about its plans on open­ing up an app ecosys­tem for its in-vehi­cle info­tain­ment sys­tems.  GM appears to be ahead of the curve with sev­er­al con­firmed app part­ners, a full SDK, and a suite of API’s avail­able to third par­ty devel­op­ers.  GM plans on dis­trib­ut­ing approved cat­a­log apps with­in its “App Shop” and cur­rent­ly offers sup­port to the devel­op­er com­mu­ni­ty in the form of emu­la­tors and open com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  Cross men­tions that over 1500 down­loads of its SDK have been made (avail­able at developer.GM.com) and the first vehi­cles to fea­ture these new apps will be debut­ing in just a few months in select 2014 MY vehicles.

At CTIA in Las Vegas, GM pre­sent­ed onlook­ers with an impres­sive booth, refresh­ments and a ver­sion of its Cadil­lac User Expe­ri­ence (CUE), demon­strat­ing future func­tion­al­i­ty with app part­ners like The Weath­er Chan­nel, iHeart Radio, Tunein, and Slacker. 

Cross also men­tioned that through GM’s API’s, appli­ca­tions can also inter­face direct­ly with select­ed vehi­cle hard­ware, so aspir­ing devel­op­ers can use this infor­ma­tion to build bet­ter inte­grat­ed in-vehi­cle appli­ca­tion solutions.

GM expects to fea­ture down­loaded apps in all vehi­cle info­tain­ment sys­tems it pro­duces includ­ing the Cadil­lac CUE, Buick/GMC IntelliLink and Chevy MyLink – cou­pled that with full 4G LTE sup­port next year and an expect­ed roll­out of 9 mil­lion vehi­cles annu­al­ly, we expect that GM will serve as the first to mar­ket, and cer­tain­ly the largest vehi­cle relat­ed app ecosys­tem in the world.

ISBX, hav­ing devel­oped mobile app solu­tions for glob­al con­sumer elec­tron­ics brands and auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­tur­ers alike, is thor­ough­ly impressed with GM’s progress on this front and is excit­ed to both, par­tic­i­pate in, and be a part of the future of the in-vehi­cle app market.