Apple has partnered with Indian car-sharing company Ola to make Apple Music available to customers using the company's cars. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Apple Music, as will happen with the Sony, Fynd, and Audio Compass services, will be incorporated into a new platform called Ola Play, which allows customers to choose music to listen to, watch videos, read e-books and even adjust the temperature. of the car itself, all from a tablet built into the car.
Therefore, Apple Music will be one of the audio options, allowing customers to choose what music they want to listen to in the car sound system during the course of the trip they are taking. Ola, which owns XNUMX percent of the Indian ride-sharing market, believes that the new Ola Play platform will “completely transform” the driving and car transport experience in India.
According to an analyst at Brulte and Co. who spoke directly to the newspaper Los Angeles Times, the matter must be viewed globally. It is no coincidence that Apple is going to offer this service in India, since it already offers it in China, in a similar company, with the same business model, called Didi Chuxing. However, according to this source it seems that the intention of Tim Cook's company would go further and would reach the option of being able to connect vehicles with each other, in a more complex way, in the not too distant future. Apple's ambitions to ensure its presence in this type of transport services seem to be aimed at connecting and exchanging information between vehicles.
Apple invested a billion dollars in Didi, the Chinese community transport giant, so it has access to all its data. Now Apple will also have access to the data offered by Apple Music through Ola, "said Grayson Brulte, president of the technology consultancy Brulte and Co. He continued by stating that" this is how they begin to put pieces together for a market global future and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple try to gather all the data in the food chain.
Brulte said that “it would not be surprising to see Apple move from working on self-driving autonomous cars to working on services and interfaces that the drivers and passengers of transportation services vehicles like these interact with. Think how successful it would be to bring the simple and elegant design of iOS to vehicles… ”.
With Apple putting its own desire to develop its own vehicle on hold or on hold, it is said that Apple may be working on developing autonomous driving software that could be incorporated into vehicles made by other car manufacturers. Such a system, without a doubt, would be perfectly capable of integrating with iOS devices, offering a series of totally unsuspected functionalities to date.
Apple has been making forays into the automobile market for several years, for example with CarPlay, which is already incorporated in many of the new vehicle models that are manufactured in 2016 and 2017. For all this, it is logical to think that a system of Autonomous driving could be a natural evolution of this.
The rumor mill also hints that Apple could use Didi ChuXing to test this type of software in the future, as it provides Apple with a large fleet of vehicles to work with. Apple invested a lot of money in Didi ChuXing in May 2016 and now has a seat on the company's board of directors.
Ola Play, meanwhile, will be available in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi for customers of the “Ola Select” modality, starting next week. It will be extended to other types of clients within approximately three months.