9 ms·

GM Deprecating In-Car App Store for Models as Recent as 2020

69 points by goopthink 11mo ago

justahuman74 11mo ago
Why didn't they just keep it on life support?
- Jtsummers 11mo ago
  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).
  - coryrc 11mo ago
    > 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
fred_is_fred 11mo ago
This is the same company that plans to block Airplay and Android Auto no less.
- mouth 11mo ago
  Carplay, not Airplay, but yes.
conk 11mo ago
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.
- nneonneo 11mo ago
  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.
  - mdasen 11mo ago
    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.
    - mips_avatar 11mo ago
      GM has a unique customer base of people willing to buy bad cars
      - winrid 11mo ago
ifh-hn 11mo ago
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.
- darksaints 11mo ago
  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.
  - ifh-hn 11mo ago
    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.
  - palmotea 11mo ago
    > 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.
nneonneo 11mo ago
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.
- Simulacra 11mo ago
  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.
  - hmmokidk 11mo ago
    Leas than zero sales is still zero? I don’t see the issue
outside1234 11mo ago
GM the company is next, probably within 8 years.
worthless-trash 11mo ago
GM tech management, If you wanna talk I'm here for you. Who is forcing your hand here.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  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.
  - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
    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.
stbenjam 11mo ago
From the brand that brought you “people don’t want CarPlay”
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  "Trust us," I whisper, as I condemn yet another product to the planned obsolescence graveyard.
numpad0 11mo ago
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.
- wtallis 11mo ago
  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.
  - numpad0 11mo ago
    USB-C can't readily carry everything. There are specific and expensive electronic switch things on host side that has to be handled with gloves by experienced mixed signal experts. It's standardized and allowed, but you're on your own in terms of making it work. Getting HID through HDMI is nothing compared to that. Just Arduino level stuff. It only has to be standardized for interoperability. Car brands that seek to disinfect cars of Apple/Google disease will benefit a lot from that.
- yard2010 11mo ago
  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.
jabroni_salad 11mo ago
Business as usual for anyone that used OnStar in the mid 2010s.
kens 11mo ago
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.
- coin 11mo ago
  Yes this trend is rewriting the title is annoying. I wish there were a way to downvote posts.
  - vermilingua 11mo ago
    There is, flag is for posts that violate site terms, and editorialising titles violates site terms.
- arjie 11mo ago
  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
dthedavid 11mo ago
Auto makers have always been bad at software. They just don’t care. Tesla is an exception.
arwhatever 11mo ago
Juuuussssst give me dumb pass-through display and audio mirroring from my phone.
anjel 11mo ago
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.)
56J8XhH7voFRwPR 11mo ago
Its moves like these that make me bet on Tesla. They are miles ahead of legacy auto when it comes to technology and I'm not even referring to any of the self driving stuff (which is also miles ahead of anything else). I feel more and more vehicles are moving from complex mechanical machines with crap software slapped on top to computers on wheels. Back to the Tesla example, the entire car is designed around the software and the hardware that software runs on. We live in a world now where most car buyers grew up with smartphones and everything IoT under the sun and in another 20-30 years every car buyer will have grown up in that world. The younger generation expects good tech in their car. If you have a legacy auto, when was the last time you got an update to the infotainment system? I've owned a model y for a year and half now and in that time have had 36 updates averaging an update every 16 days. I can honestly say my car has gotten better since I bought it. New features like adaptive headlights, more streaming music and podcast apps. new UI, etc. A buddy of mine has a 2018 model s and is still getting software updates and new features. What legacy auto car from 7 years ago is still getting software updates?

69 points by goopthink 11mo ago

justahuman74 11mo ago

Why didn't they just keep it on life support?

Jtsummers 11mo ago
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).
- coryrc 11mo ago
  > 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

fred_is_fred 11mo ago

This is the same company that plans to block Airplay and Android Auto no less.

mouth 11mo ago
Carplay, not Airplay, but yes.

conk 11mo ago

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.

nneonneo 11mo ago
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.
- mdasen 11mo ago
  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.
  - mips_avatar 11mo ago
    GM has a unique customer base of people willing to buy bad cars
    - winrid 11mo ago

ifh-hn 11mo ago

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.

darksaints 11mo ago
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.
- ifh-hn 11mo ago
  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.
- palmotea 11mo ago
  > 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.

nneonneo 11mo ago

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.

Simulacra 11mo ago
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.
- hmmokidk 11mo ago
  Leas than zero sales is still zero? I don’t see the issue

outside1234 11mo ago

GM the company is next, probably within 8 years.

worthless-trash 11mo ago

GM tech management, If you wanna talk I'm here for you. Who is forcing your hand here.

CamperBob2 11mo ago
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.
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  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.

stbenjam 11mo ago

From the brand that brought you “people don’t want CarPlay”

TulliusCicero 11mo ago
"Trust us," I whisper, as I condemn yet another product to the planned obsolescence graveyard.

numpad0 11mo ago

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.

wtallis 11mo ago
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.
- numpad0 11mo ago
  USB-C can't readily carry everything. There are specific and expensive electronic switch things on host side that has to be handled with gloves by experienced mixed signal experts. It's standardized and allowed, but you're on your own in terms of making it work. Getting HID through HDMI is nothing compared to that. Just Arduino level stuff. It only has to be standardized for interoperability. Car brands that seek to disinfect cars of Apple/Google disease will benefit a lot from that.
yard2010 11mo ago
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.

jabroni_salad 11mo ago

Business as usual for anyone that used OnStar in the mid 2010s.

kens 11mo ago

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.

coin 11mo ago
Yes this trend is rewriting the title is annoying. I wish there were a way to downvote posts.
- vermilingua 11mo ago
  There is, flag is for posts that violate site terms, and editorialising titles violates site terms.
arjie 11mo ago
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

dthedavid 11mo ago

Auto makers have always been bad at software. They just don’t care. Tesla is an exception.

arwhatever 11mo ago

Juuuussssst give me dumb pass-through display and audio mirroring from my phone.

anjel 11mo ago

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.)

56J8XhH7voFRwPR 11mo ago

Its moves like these that make me bet on Tesla. They are miles ahead of legacy auto when it comes to technology and I'm not even referring to any of the self driving stuff (which is also miles ahead of anything else). I feel more and more vehicles are moving from complex mechanical machines with crap software slapped on top to computers on wheels. Back to the Tesla example, the entire car is designed around the software and the hardware that software runs on. We live in a world now where most car buyers grew up with smartphones and everything IoT under the sun and in another 20-30 years every car buyer will have grown up in that world. The younger generation expects good tech in their car. If you have a legacy auto, when was the last time you got an update to the infotainment system? I've owned a model y for a year and half now and in that time have had 36 updates averaging an update every 16 days. I can honestly say my car has gotten better since I bought it. New features like adaptive headlights, more streaming music and podcast apps. new UI, etc. A buddy of mine has a 2018 model s and is still getting software updates and new features. What legacy auto car from 7 years ago is still getting software updates?