SEATTLE â€" Nestled in the driver’s seat of a Mini, one of the stylish, pint-sized coupes, Bryan Trussel fiddled with an app called Glympse that allows people to share their locations with others for short periods.
Rather than staring down at the screen of his iPhone, Mr. Trussel’s eyes were locked on the dashboard, where the app was displayed on a large, circular screen. Glympse is part of a wave of smartphone apps breaking free of small screens to get onto dashboard displays so they become a bigger part of people’s lives.
“There is a lot of attention and money going into this space,†said Mr. Trussel, the chief executive of Glympse.
Automakers are proceeding carefully with in-car apps because of the safety concerns around distracted driving. (Mr. Trussel, it should be noted, was giving his demo in a parked car.)
Although there’s not a lot they can do to stop people from burying their noses in their smartphone screens when they’re in cars, automakers can exercise control over whether and how smartphone apps integrate with their dashboard displays. Carmakers argue that in-dash apps are safer to use, in part because dashboard displays are closer to a driver’s view of the road than a smartphone is likely to be.
“For us, the ability to integrate a smartphone like an iPhone into a car to make operating it easier and safer is critically important,†said David Bloom, manager of the app center of the BMW Group’s technology office in Mountain View, Calif.
BMW’s effort to integrate Glympse into its cars, a deal being announced this week in New York, is a good example of how car and app makers are working together. BMW is also announcing the plans to integrate several other apps â€" including Audible, Rhapsody and TuneIn â€" into its cars, including its Mini family of vehicles, on top of Pandora, MOG and other apps that are already integrated with BMW displays.
People with iPhones running the Glympse app must plug their devices into a cable inside BMWs to see the app on their dashboards. They can use iDrive, a control knob on the center console of BMWs, to switch between functions of the app. The Glympse app still runs on an iPhone when it’s on a BMW dashboard screen, but its menus are projected in a format designed for the car’s display. Glympse has announced similar integration deals with Ford and Mercedes.
Glympse was conceived partly as a way to make it unnecessary for people to text others about their locations â€" a spouse expecting them at home, say, or a group of colleagues anxiously awaiting their presence at a lunch meeting. The app lets you share your location in increments from minutes up to four hours. Before you get rolling in a car, you can send a Glympse message that allows any recipient to see you on a map as you make progress to your destination.
In many newer cars, drivers can link music apps on their smartphones to the car stereo system over a cable or wirelessly through Bluetooth. This usually allows only a rudimentary level of control over the apps from a dashboard display, like skipping to the next song.
The app that Glympse designed for BMWs provides access to a deeper selection of the app’s functions, but the company still worked closely with the carmaker to edit out access to features, like those that rely on text entry, to make it safer to use behind the wheel.
“We try and curate the experience so it’s not distracting,†said Philip Johnston, product manager for the BMW Group application integration platform
