Turn you smartphone into a car head unit
How to adapt your app to a car easily
We are living in digital time when everything can be found or at least hinted online. Such approach goes into various directions including making your driving digital.
It’s not unusual to find a smartphone hooked up to a car, but in the vast majority of cases this is only done to perform simple tasks to free your hands during a drive like answering calls, using a navigation app, or playing music.
First thing that comes to mind is a GPS system to navigate your way. Still, today I want to share with you a complelety different story about our experience in adaptation of an app to inner system of the car.
If everything is done right and the app is adapted you can use your app on a board screen in the car just by simply plugging your device into it with USB-cabel. After the magical plug all the info neccessary can be seen from a board screen living your hands free to drive.
Sounds pretty simple, isn’t it?
In reality this adaptation process can be rather difficult due to one of this factors:
- Inner system of the car is hard to change
- The testing process can be done only from the inner network
When we adapted Landrover app for its clients to mySPIN system we faced both difficulties. Here I try to explain how we overcame them.
The complexity of the task was enormous: the system installed connects private car of every user with his device only after complex authenification process with checking vehicle indetification number and its passport. Complex authentification means long loading period, but we needed to make it as fast as possible.
Still, while speaking about mySPIN system, you cannot avoid complex authentification. We found another way around the problem.
mySPIN system from Bocsh that goes pre-installed on Landrover cars allows to launch the app on the car screen in a safe mode and we used this feature to show quickly the most useful information while saving the other features to load in process and be available through side menu.
While driving users rarely use many features, only the most handy ones. So, we hadled the first obstacle on the road to successful adaptation.
There was one more to come. We needed to adapt an inner app for Landrover loyalty program for an inner system of the car which means that we cannot perform testing from any place we want.
To make testing process easier Bosch created an emulator version of car touchscreen for developers. We thought that it can cover our problems, but emulator has various restrictions that make testing process incomplete.
That is why we decided to perform the adaptation test on two sides: on our and on the client’ side where you can start the app live on a vechicle. In result, we completed the enormous testing process on emulator and JLR cars where you can test it during driving, and reduced risks of new bugs appearing to its minimum.
The whole case soon will be available online on our site where you can read everything about our working experience with Landrover.
Please, don’t read this piece as a one that scream to you that it’s hard to do — it’s not. I’m just sharing some things that seemed like an obstacle for our team in the begining and was than transformed into advantage.
