Having followed the discussions about Waze, app SDK’s, and app mirroring I’ve come to think that one likely, but not often discussed, option available to Tesla is what is the approach Alabata has taken with WebLink.
What Elon tweeted about a year and a half ago, app mirroring, is a difficult promise to fulfill, at least for iPhones and as usually imagined. I think most envision the phones home screen mirrored on the center console, but I think this is unlikely. The one way to do this natively, via AirPlay, doesn’t seem to support touch feedback so the utility of it would be limited since the user would still have to use the phone for touch input. I don’t know what Androids approach to this would be but in both cases it would be dependent on OS level support that Google and Apple may not be enthusiastic about.
The other option to app mirroring is something similar to WebLink and something that Tesla could, maybe, more easily do with backward compatibility to most if not all cars. In this case, the mirroring isn’t handled by the phone OS but rather by an app on the phone. So any plugins like Waze or media control would be served by the phone through the app running on it onto the center console. You wouldn’t be able to play Pokémon Go for instance. Instead the user would have to launch the Tesla app and if the developer had written a plugin for the app then that plugin would be mirrored on screen.
There was a WebLink demo at CES that, in my opinion, was less than impressive but at least showed how the process would work. Essentially an app on the phone was running a Waze plugin written in HTML5 and displayed on a Kenwood head unit with full interactivity and without the need for CarPlay or AndroidAuto.
Below is a link to give an idea of how this would work. Ultimately, I hope that someone at Tesla is working on something. My opinion is that Tesla missed the boat on this and I hope that they don’t forget this oversight.