First party operating systems always seem to be terrible.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I would extend that and just say all first party operating systems are shitty
Up to now, I believe, these systems were not first-party but built by the manufacturers of the infotainment systems. Now, Mercedes is taking this in-house to get it right and integrate it with the rest of the far more properly?
I don't really have any more faith in Mercedes than I do with infotainment systems.
I don't doubt that they have amazing org knowledge around integrating data systems, but how are they with... any of the myriad of other components of operating systems?
BMW's is alright IMO. Unorthodox in its layout but it actually works well with the center console knob thingy and has historically been low-latency even back when every other manufacturer had a 2 second delay for every action on their awful touch screens.
Of course even BMW's system is still going to end up being an overly expensive Android Auto/Apple CarPlay launcher because what people want is Waze & Spotify, not random traffic updates from last week & DAB.
They should bring better UX engineers into the boat.
The old M.B os and its touch interface (in combination with the physical touchpad) is a horror even for digital matured persons.
To me it felt like they dont want you to operate the cars system during driving and let everything taking care by the bullshit voice recognition.
Voice recognition is the most infuriating replacement for physical buttons.
Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.
It has to be like this.
Most of the stuff I try out I often come back to ask myself, did those engineers ever use their developed shit on their own?
What is so wrong with CarPlay or Android Auto T_T
CarPlay and Android Auto aren't car OSes though, they're merely an infotainment interface. You still need a way for the user to check the tire pressure, choose between sports mode and eco mode... Cars manufacturers could just implement the basics and let CarPlay/Auto do the rest but in that case anyone that doesn't have a compatible phone is stuck without infotainment, same if you run out of battery.
CarPlay and Auto being so good is somewhat to blame for first party interfaces being that bad though: why spend litteral millions on look and feel if you know the users who care won't be using it
Yes, this is a good point. I think the best way to do it is to have the car controls visible at all times, with the CarPlay/Auto interface wrapped in a frame. This is how Jeep does it.
It's worth mentioning that Android Auto doesn't work on GrapheneOS due to the privileged access it requires, and will not support it unless it is re-architected. Which phones were you thinking of when you said "compatible"?
Car companies using Qt, what else is new?
I heard the rumor that Linux desktop environments use it too. Now hopefully multimedia apps with 3 letters like VLC and OBS can adopt it too.
j/k
I worked for a German car company for a little bit, in a team responsible for a similar system: https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/
I'd be curious to read more about the context of this. It looks like there are soo many low hanging fruits for anyone with mid-level technical seniority to step in and improve the situation measurably. Scala isn't bad but sbt definitely has plenty of (avoidable in hindsight) footguns. The tooling ecosystem of Scala has also improved leaps and bounds in the last couple years. Of course that doesn't do anything to the seemingly disfunctional organization but like the engineering post it was, it didn't concern itself with it much.
Why not Android Auto and Apple Car Play? First party systems suck
While I agree that first party systems suck, as someone with neither an iOS or Android device I personally prefer something work rather than a screen that says "connect iOS/Android".
True. Why not all three? Options
Will it collect data about my sexual activity?
and then they'll turn around and charge you $5 to turn your ac on
Why aren't car companies evaluating React Native on mobile OS's since that seems to be the way of embedded touch UIs going forward?
Because Qt is actually better than those things?