Smartcar: the connected car API for developers
Starting today, you can create a Smartcar developer account and start building apps that communicate with connected cars.
Since 2015, we’ve been working on a standard API that lets developers communicate with cars (think “lock doors,” or “check odometer”) from web and mobile applications.
This idea came from the following observations and beliefs:
- Building apps that communicate with connected vehicles is difficult — too difficult for most developers to consider integrating with cars.
- Developers need a simple and hardware-free path to build for connected cars of all brands, not just one or two.
- Vehicle owners who connect their cars to apps should be in total control of what data they share with these applications.
On March 1st, we started inviting developers to use our platform. We’ve worked closely with them in the weeks since to see what was working well and what we needed to improve. Here’s what we’ve built (and learned) in the months since…
We’ve been hard at work building our developer experience.
Over the past few months, we’ve focused on creating a developer experience that makes it easy to get up and running with Smartcar.
What we’ve shipped
- A basic endpoint set focused on vehicle info, location, odometer, lock and unlock doors
- A support center with getting started guides and FAQs
- SDKs in 5 languages
- An open-source demo app that helps you get off the ground quickly with Smartcar
- An authentication flow that lets us add support for additional car brands with zero development effort
What our developers have asked for
- Help with making their first request to Smartcar (check out our support center)
- Compatibility with more brands (5 shipped with more on the way)
- Support for teams in our developer portal (coming soon!)
- More API endpoints (coming soon!)
Today we’re opening our platform to developers everywhere. We can’t wait to see what you build on Smartcar — and our team is here to help every step of the way.
Ready to get started?
Create an account, run our demo, and let us know what you think 🚀
Originally published at smartcar.com on July 18, 2018.
