GM is removing CarPlay, and now this story that they are dropping support for in car infotainment apps for cars that are 5-7 years old. Are consumers really going to buy their cars? I won’t consider a new car that doesn’t offer CarPlay/android auto.
I am so glad that I insisted on buying a car with CarPlay five years ago. At the time a number of our options did not have CarPlay, but were otherwise quite solid cars. If I'd gone with any of them I'd likely be a lot less happy than I am now: given that I use CarPlay on literally every drive, it's probably the single most important feature to have.
I get that GM doesn't want to cede the important center console to third parties because it feels like giving up their control, but man, is it ever going to be the wrong choice for them.
I agree with you that it's the wrong choice, but it's not just about ceding control. It's also about ceding the revenue.
For example, to connect their system to the internet, that'll be $20/mo. I'd guess GM gets a large portion of that revenue. If you're using CarPlay, there's no reason for you to buy their service.
It looks like GM makes around $1,000 in profit per vehicle. If half of their customers give them $20/mo for a decade, that's $1,200 in additional revenue. If AT&T takes half of that, it's still $600 which is a solid boost to their profits.
Now, you might say that fewer people would buy their cars and I'd agree - but companies make short sighted plays all the time that backfire. Someone does the kind of back of the envelope math that I did above and says "omg, I can increase our profits by 60% with this one easy trick" and it's wrong because the world doesn't work like that, but you put together some consultants and consumer surveys that are favorable and you get the green light.
I know: GM is just killing their relationship with consumers. I agree with you. But think about what Unity did to their developers. Unity saw the chance to charge a fee every time a game was installed and all the money that would bring - and didn't think about the predictable developer backlash. Companies do these types of things.
It's about GM and Google getting the data (https://www.motortrend.com/features/apple-carplay-android-au...). Switching from Android Auto and CarPlay to the Android Automotive OS (AAOS) means the auto manufacturer gets the data that was going through the phone.
CarPlay is a purchasing factor for me personally. I've always liked Volvo, but now that they all run AAOS the last few times I rented one I had to reboot the head unit when I got in the car to get CarPlay to work. Funny how vehicles running AAOS don't really integrate well with a competitor...
I know I'm slippery sloping but I wonder if they won't get rid of bluetooth and aux ports in the future. Letting people play spotify on their phone's data connection is money on the table when they could be selling their own data plans, getting a cut from their own app stores etc.
My manual Spark is pretty fun and beats Civic Sis and other fast cars in rallycross. I have done 100+ redline clutch dumps in that car. It still drives fine.
It’s not as “integrated” into the car, but if you just want CarPlay, there are cheap single-purpose “tablets” that mount to your dashboard and either pair to your car’s Bluetooth or plug into the Aux port and just do CarPlay/Android Auto. Amazon is full of them. Ultimately it’s just a video and touch transport protocol, with some additional channels like illumination and I hear speed on some models.
What's stopping someone from spending a few hundred bucks at their local custom stereo shop and replacing the head unit with something else that is less user hostile? If everything else in the car is what you need, just replace the part you don't like if it's not available as an option.
I think it drives the instrument cluster too. Maybe instead of a new head unit, what we will need in the future is an open version of Android Automotive OS, like Lineage for our cars.
We use CarPlay with our Mazda. The heads up display on the windshield displays the next turn information from Apple Maps.
These days the head unit has its tendrils wrapped around many parts of the car besides just infotainment, and wiring harnesses are a lot more proprietary. Does the aftermarket head unit support your car's parking sensors? How about the backup camera? Even the Homelink button that opens your garage door has migrated to the touchscreen in a lot of newer cars, never mind forehead-slapping features like the climate control settings.
The days of single- and double-DIN stereo swapping are slipping away fast. You're pretty much stuck with what you get when you buy the car, so it had better be what you want.
This isn't actually true. You just need a module to interface with the car in place of the original head unit. For example the iDatalink Maestro can connect HVAC controls, engine diagnostics, tire pressure, etc to compatible head units. And there are a lot of compatible head units, basically all the worthwhile ones have Maestro support.
After market stereos were always the norm for actual technology. Crutchfield made it super accessible.
Automakers moved into it to try and capture more of that stream.
And generally they can’t keep up.
Cars don’t seem to change much except for the dash tech.
So mane it’s time to own the smarts yourself.
You could get any car and get a big android screen (some have tesla size screens) for your vehicle like those made by phoenix android radio. Only mentioning them as an example not the only choice.
All the built in car screens and graphics continue to work, plus put whatever you like on it.
Was it removing or has it been removed? Seems like a while ago they announced it.
Anyway, no way I was buying a GM car because of that. I don't believe a car manufacturer can create a better software experience than a software company.
The title "GM Deprecating In-Car App Store for Models as Recent as 2020" is not the real title, which is "These GM Vehicles Can No Longer Download Apps Through Their Infotainment System"
I'll also point out that "deprecate" is not a fancy synonym for "shutting down"; it means that something is discouraged and might be removed in the future. GM is not deprecating the app store; they are removing access.
The slow transformation of 'deprecating' to 'ending' has somehow happened across a period where I didn't notice it happening. Most recently this bit me when a place I was contracting at received notice that a vendor was 'deprecating' some old API they used in May of 2025. Okay, thanks for the warning, and I'll prioritize dealing with that later in the year.
As it so happens, the vendor intended to say that they were insta-sunsetting/deleting/ending-access-to that endpoint. The switch wasn't too much effort for an engineer on the team but that was honestly my first encounter with the fact that "deprecation" today means "deletion" to a lot of people.
There's a few things like this that have semantic drift over time:
CarPlay/Android Auto is how you can get a modern infotainment system on a car that's a decade old. A new phone - a fraction of the cost of a new car - and you get access to all the new shiny stuff. That also means that people are less incentivized to upgrade a car that has CarPlay/Android Auto support - probably exactly the reason why GM wants to drop support for them.
I had a 2012 Toyota Camry once that I upgraded the stereo system so I could use CarPlay. Huge improvement. I think this is a really terrible move by GM considering all the people who have android and iPhones, why would you want this vehicle? It's a step backwards.
This is everything that is wrong with "smart" devices. Just give me a normal radio with Bluetooth capabilities, especially if you're unwilling to support something for the reasonable life of your product.
I have one of these cars, the last model year before they switched to carplay. The bluetooth implementation is dogshit...randomly speeding up songs, audio skipping, cutting out, etc. Occasionally forgets connections and has to be set up from scratch. Can't handle music and navigation at the same time...will turn down volume on music to handle navigation instructions, only to forget to turn the music back up for 5 minutes, by which time you've already turned up the volume to compensate and get blasted by the unexpected volume increase. And from what I can tell, my car does it better than most other manufacturers from the same era.
I think the only reason why the car makers switched to carplay/android auto is because they knew they sucked at infotainment systems and software and nobody wanted their bullshit, so they just outsourced it so they wouldn't have to try anymore.
That situation is ridiculous, my 15 year old diesel has an extremely bare bones touchscreen radio/info dashboard. The Bluetooth, old as it is, works fine.
> The bluetooth implementation is dogshit...randomly speeding up songs, audio skipping, cutting out, etc. Occasionally forgets connections and has to be set up from scratch.
We need to go back to the days of headphone jacks and analog AUX ports. Seriously. Something simple, reliable, and extremely well-understood.
Cars should be a lot more modular, but the market is consumer-hostile in general and it won't happen without regulation. There should probably be some standardized car-infotainment interface, and consumers be required to buy the infotainment system aftermarket to get more competition and quality in that area.
Why isn't there still no HID or touch coordinate feedback feature in HDMI? That would solve this problem once and for all. There are Ethernet over HDMI, CEC(IR remote), ARC for audio, but not USB or touch. That seems like a mildly big oversight.
HDMI is first and foremost (and at times, almost exclusively) designed to serve the needs of TVs and related devices. Its presence on PCs and other devices outside the home theater space is largely a consequence of the fact that HDMI until recently was just a new connector carrying DVI signals plus some extensions.
The more relevant connector here would be USB-C, which can readily carry a mix of DisplayPort video signals, USB (including HID), and power, over a connector that is now universal for smartphones. A phone today connected over USB-C could handle all the processing for a very "dumb" car head unit. Aftermarket head units are mostly Android devices already, albeit not literally using USB-C internally.
The problem is that the car manufacturers need a way to extract more money to "grow" and pay for their execs. This won't solve this problem for them, just create another one.
Now this is the problem. Money on a large scale just becomes a huge conflict of interest. This is where regulation should come in, but real regulation, not the bs of the crooked business man that manages the country in the same way.
Wall Street, by all accounts. For an unsexy old-school company like GM, the slightest possibility of achieving a recurring revenue stream and control of customer data flow is worth risking everything. It's all they have to offer their stockholders at this point.
At the same time, it's not really a question of "risking everything." After 2008-2009, GM understands that there is no way they will ever be allowed to fail as a company. They don't see much downside in alienating large swaths of their customer base, simply because there isn't much downside. They think they're in a good position to take stupid chances, and unfortunately they are not wrong.
Which kinda make sense if it results in more revenue. The right move here for consumers is to punish this behavior by not buying GM cars until they put Android Auto/Apple Carplay back, giving consumers that option.
They wanted to demonstrate why their move away from Apple CarPlay and Android Auto is a bad idea and why people shouldn't buy their cars (if they care about them still functioning after 4-6 years).
> why people shouldn't buy their cars (if they care about them still functioning after 4-6 years).
People have had 45 years to get the message. My Michigan parents' lives changed[0] when they got their first Toyota after a lifetime of Big 3 vehicles. Too bad it took so long to get out from under the indoctrination.
[0] Okay I exaggerate but really nice having a vehicle without something constantly broken and/or leaking
GM is removing CarPlay, and now this story that they are dropping support for in car infotainment apps for cars that are 5-7 years old. Are consumers really going to buy their cars? I won’t consider a new car that doesn’t offer CarPlay/android auto.
I am so glad that I insisted on buying a car with CarPlay five years ago. At the time a number of our options did not have CarPlay, but were otherwise quite solid cars. If I'd gone with any of them I'd likely be a lot less happy than I am now: given that I use CarPlay on literally every drive, it's probably the single most important feature to have.
I get that GM doesn't want to cede the important center console to third parties because it feels like giving up their control, but man, is it ever going to be the wrong choice for them.
I agree with you that it's the wrong choice, but it's not just about ceding control. It's also about ceding the revenue.
For example, to connect their system to the internet, that'll be $20/mo. I'd guess GM gets a large portion of that revenue. If you're using CarPlay, there's no reason for you to buy their service.
It looks like GM makes around $1,000 in profit per vehicle. If half of their customers give them $20/mo for a decade, that's $1,200 in additional revenue. If AT&T takes half of that, it's still $600 which is a solid boost to their profits.
Now, you might say that fewer people would buy their cars and I'd agree - but companies make short sighted plays all the time that backfire. Someone does the kind of back of the envelope math that I did above and says "omg, I can increase our profits by 60% with this one easy trick" and it's wrong because the world doesn't work like that, but you put together some consultants and consumer surveys that are favorable and you get the green light.
I know: GM is just killing their relationship with consumers. I agree with you. But think about what Unity did to their developers. Unity saw the chance to charge a fee every time a game was installed and all the money that would bring - and didn't think about the predictable developer backlash. Companies do these types of things.
It's about GM and Google getting the data (https://www.motortrend.com/features/apple-carplay-android-au...). Switching from Android Auto and CarPlay to the Android Automotive OS (AAOS) means the auto manufacturer gets the data that was going through the phone.
CarPlay is a purchasing factor for me personally. I've always liked Volvo, but now that they all run AAOS the last few times I rented one I had to reboot the head unit when I got in the car to get CarPlay to work. Funny how vehicles running AAOS don't really integrate well with a competitor...
I know I'm slippery sloping but I wonder if they won't get rid of bluetooth and aux ports in the future. Letting people play spotify on their phone's data connection is money on the table when they could be selling their own data plans, getting a cut from their own app stores etc.
GM has a unique customer base of people willing to buy bad cars
Corvette?? Tahoe??
My manual Spark is pretty fun and beats Civic Sis and other fast cars in rallycross. I have done 100+ redline clutch dumps in that car. It still drives fine.
Does it have CarPlay?
If they offered to enable CarPlay/AA for $20/mo... would they sell more cars and increase profits? Or would the result be even more annoyed buyers?
People actually pay for that? I would rather pay for a phone holder and use the phone in loudspeaker.
Or simply not buy the car to begin with
Those cars connect to WiFi, so you just need to tether them to your phone after the 8 years of free data ends. No $20/month necessary.
I rule them out because of the lack of quality in their vehicles. Too unreliable and impossible to repair.
The infotainment only adds to reasons to not buy GM.
It’s not as “integrated” into the car, but if you just want CarPlay, there are cheap single-purpose “tablets” that mount to your dashboard and either pair to your car’s Bluetooth or plug into the Aux port and just do CarPlay/Android Auto. Amazon is full of them. Ultimately it’s just a video and touch transport protocol, with some additional channels like illumination and I hear speed on some models.
I've got one of those in my 2004 Mazda. It even came with a backup camera. Best 50 Euros ever spent. :)
I got one too... the camera is still up on my bookshelf a year later.
What's stopping someone from spending a few hundred bucks at their local custom stereo shop and replacing the head unit with something else that is less user hostile? If everything else in the car is what you need, just replace the part you don't like if it's not available as an option.
I think it drives the instrument cluster too. Maybe instead of a new head unit, what we will need in the future is an open version of Android Automotive OS, like Lineage for our cars.
We use CarPlay with our Mazda. The heads up display on the windshield displays the next turn information from Apple Maps.
Edit: it looks like Lineage has support for Android Automotive: https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/
These days the head unit has its tendrils wrapped around many parts of the car besides just infotainment, and wiring harnesses are a lot more proprietary. Does the aftermarket head unit support your car's parking sensors? How about the backup camera? Even the Homelink button that opens your garage door has migrated to the touchscreen in a lot of newer cars, never mind forehead-slapping features like the climate control settings.
The days of single- and double-DIN stereo swapping are slipping away fast. You're pretty much stuck with what you get when you buy the car, so it had better be what you want.
This isn't actually true. You just need a module to interface with the car in place of the original head unit. For example the iDatalink Maestro can connect HVAC controls, engine diagnostics, tire pressure, etc to compatible head units. And there are a lot of compatible head units, basically all the worthwhile ones have Maestro support.
Wish there was rules around interoperability. Having to buy a whole new car to get your apps back is terrible.
I don’t understand why anyone would buy a GM car. This is just frosting on the cake.
After market stereos were always the norm for actual technology. Crutchfield made it super accessible.
Automakers moved into it to try and capture more of that stream.
And generally they can’t keep up.
Cars don’t seem to change much except for the dash tech.
So mane it’s time to own the smarts yourself.
You could get any car and get a big android screen (some have tesla size screens) for your vehicle like those made by phoenix android radio. Only mentioning them as an example not the only choice.
All the built in car screens and graphics continue to work, plus put whatever you like on it.
Was it removing or has it been removed? Seems like a while ago they announced it.
Anyway, no way I was buying a GM car because of that. I don't believe a car manufacturer can create a better software experience than a software company.
The title "GM Deprecating In-Car App Store for Models as Recent as 2020" is not the real title, which is "These GM Vehicles Can No Longer Download Apps Through Their Infotainment System"
I'll also point out that "deprecate" is not a fancy synonym for "shutting down"; it means that something is discouraged and might be removed in the future. GM is not deprecating the app store; they are removing access.
The slow transformation of 'deprecating' to 'ending' has somehow happened across a period where I didn't notice it happening. Most recently this bit me when a place I was contracting at received notice that a vendor was 'deprecating' some old API they used in May of 2025. Okay, thanks for the warning, and I'll prioritize dealing with that later in the year.
As it so happens, the vendor intended to say that they were insta-sunsetting/deleting/ending-access-to that endpoint. The switch wasn't too much effort for an engineer on the team but that was honestly my first encounter with the fact that "deprecation" today means "deletion" to a lot of people.
There's a few things like this that have semantic drift over time:
1. deprecate -> delete
2. refactor -> rewrite
3. data normalization -> data cleanup
4. hash/encrypt -> now often interchanged
5. authenticate/authorize -> interchanged
6. bricked -> has error, often recoverable
Yes this trend is rewriting the title is annoying. I wish there were a way to downvote posts.
There is, flag is for posts that violate site terms, and editorialising titles violates site terms.
CarPlay/Android Auto is how you can get a modern infotainment system on a car that's a decade old. A new phone - a fraction of the cost of a new car - and you get access to all the new shiny stuff. That also means that people are less incentivized to upgrade a car that has CarPlay/Android Auto support - probably exactly the reason why GM wants to drop support for them.
I had a 2012 Toyota Camry once that I upgraded the stereo system so I could use CarPlay. Huge improvement. I think this is a really terrible move by GM considering all the people who have android and iPhones, why would you want this vehicle? It's a step backwards.
Leas than zero sales is still zero? I don’t see the issue
This is everything that is wrong with "smart" devices. Just give me a normal radio with Bluetooth capabilities, especially if you're unwilling to support something for the reasonable life of your product.
I have one of these cars, the last model year before they switched to carplay. The bluetooth implementation is dogshit...randomly speeding up songs, audio skipping, cutting out, etc. Occasionally forgets connections and has to be set up from scratch. Can't handle music and navigation at the same time...will turn down volume on music to handle navigation instructions, only to forget to turn the music back up for 5 minutes, by which time you've already turned up the volume to compensate and get blasted by the unexpected volume increase. And from what I can tell, my car does it better than most other manufacturers from the same era.
I think the only reason why the car makers switched to carplay/android auto is because they knew they sucked at infotainment systems and software and nobody wanted their bullshit, so they just outsourced it so they wouldn't have to try anymore.
That situation is ridiculous, my 15 year old diesel has an extremely bare bones touchscreen radio/info dashboard. The Bluetooth, old as it is, works fine.
> The bluetooth implementation is dogshit...randomly speeding up songs, audio skipping, cutting out, etc. Occasionally forgets connections and has to be set up from scratch.
We need to go back to the days of headphone jacks and analog AUX ports. Seriously. Something simple, reliable, and extremely well-understood.
Cars should be a lot more modular, but the market is consumer-hostile in general and it won't happen without regulation. There should probably be some standardized car-infotainment interface, and consumers be required to buy the infotainment system aftermarket to get more competition and quality in that area.
Why isn't there still no HID or touch coordinate feedback feature in HDMI? That would solve this problem once and for all. There are Ethernet over HDMI, CEC(IR remote), ARC for audio, but not USB or touch. That seems like a mildly big oversight.
HDMI is first and foremost (and at times, almost exclusively) designed to serve the needs of TVs and related devices. Its presence on PCs and other devices outside the home theater space is largely a consequence of the fact that HDMI until recently was just a new connector carrying DVI signals plus some extensions.
The more relevant connector here would be USB-C, which can readily carry a mix of DisplayPort video signals, USB (including HID), and power, over a connector that is now universal for smartphones. A phone today connected over USB-C could handle all the processing for a very "dumb" car head unit. Aftermarket head units are mostly Android devices already, albeit not literally using USB-C internally.
The problem is that the car manufacturers need a way to extract more money to "grow" and pay for their execs. This won't solve this problem for them, just create another one.
Now this is the problem. Money on a large scale just becomes a huge conflict of interest. This is where regulation should come in, but real regulation, not the bs of the crooked business man that manages the country in the same way.
Excuse me if I'm snarky.
From the brand that brought you “people don’t want CarPlay”
"Trust us," I whisper, as I condemn yet another product to the planned obsolescence graveyard.
Auto makers have always been bad at software. They just don’t care. Tesla is an exception.
Juuuussssst give me dumb pass-through display and audio mirroring from my phone.
All the half-broken cars, no longer sound for travel on US roads get sold to emerging market countries. Its a big business, (but none of yours.)
Business as usual for anyone that used OnStar in the mid 2010s.
GM tech management, If you wanna talk I'm here for you.
Who is forcing your hand here.
Wall Street, by all accounts. For an unsexy old-school company like GM, the slightest possibility of achieving a recurring revenue stream and control of customer data flow is worth risking everything. It's all they have to offer their stockholders at this point.
At the same time, it's not really a question of "risking everything." After 2008-2009, GM understands that there is no way they will ever be allowed to fail as a company. They don't see much downside in alienating large swaths of their customer base, simply because there isn't much downside. They think they're in a good position to take stupid chances, and unfortunately they are not wrong.
Which kinda make sense if it results in more revenue. The right move here for consumers is to punish this behavior by not buying GM cars until they put Android Auto/Apple Carplay back, giving consumers that option.
This is the same company that plans to block Airplay and Android Auto no less.
Carplay, not Airplay, but yes.
Why didn't they just keep it on life support?
They wanted to demonstrate why their move away from Apple CarPlay and Android Auto is a bad idea and why people shouldn't buy their cars (if they care about them still functioning after 4-6 years).
> why people shouldn't buy their cars (if they care about them still functioning after 4-6 years).
People have had 45 years to get the message. My Michigan parents' lives changed[0] when they got their first Toyota after a lifetime of Big 3 vehicles. Too bad it took so long to get out from under the indoctrination.
[0] Okay I exaggerate but really nice having a vehicle without something constantly broken and/or leaking
GM the company is next, probably within 8 years.