7. Mobile Apps for the Connected Car

This chapter presents a field with a huge innovation potential for the automotive industry, apps for connected cars. Section 7.1 reports on the current situation of the global automotive and IT market and its management and systems. In this regard, the focus in Sect. 7.2 refers to the actual trend on agile software development in the automotive industry. Agile software development places a strong focus on fast response to customer requirements, turning speed and agility into a key competitive advantage whereby the Agile Manifesto laid out the underlying concepts of agile development. In Sect. 7.3 the importance of smartphones and the corresponding app market is introduced as well as their unprecedented growth in numbers. This raises the question for their usage in vehicles. Therefore, Sect. 7.4 focuses on the iOS operating system which offers a rich set of features and a powerful application programming interface (API) for mobile app development and is fully integrated with Apple’s iCloud ecosystem. Henceforth, Sect. 7.5 launches the background of Xcode, an integrated development environment (IDE) for developers which allows multi-language and multi-target platform development for native macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS applications. The supported languages are Apple’s Objective-C and Swift with the Cocoa framework, but it is also possible to develop C and C++ applications. Section 7.6 introduces into Android applications which are usually developed in the Java language using the Android Software Development Kit. Android is a powerful operating system competing neck-to-neck with Apple’s iOS. Section 7.7 focuses on the topic how car manufactures are embracing the smartphone technologies by integrating Apple’s and Google’s hardware and software into the car’s infotainment system. Apple’s technology is called CarPlay, Google’s Android Car. In Sect. 7.8 the required programming languages for mobility app development such as Objective-C, Swift, and Java App Development are introduced. Moreover, Sect. 7.9 introduces the requirements of the use case example of the car ride-sharing models carpooling and cab sharing. Wrapping up, in Sect. 7.10 the source code of some of the key classes in the several applications is discussed. Finally, in Sect. 7.11 exercises are included in a form of a questionnaire to be answered. The last section is followed by references and suggestions for further reading.