Google Play Store could soon highlight apps built for tablets and cars

Center consoles in cars came with mechanical buttons and knobs in the analog era, but these days, most cars practically have a giant tablet housed there. This tablet-like center console is used to control car functions, but through Android Auto or Android Automotive, it can also run apps for navigation and music streaming that are optimized for distraction-less control. Since this center console is pretty much a tablet, it should also be able to run other standard apps when the car is parked. Google had the same idea, and it will soon start highlighting apps designed for tablets and compatible with your car in the Google Play Store.

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Google Play Store v43.0.18-31 includes a string indicating that Google will make it easier to identify tablet-optimized apps that are compatible with cars.

The string clearly highlights when an app is designed for tablets. Since cars usually have a tablet-like center console, these apps will work on that surface in a tablet-optimized layout.

This is likely to be a part of Google’s Car-ready mobile apps program that was announced at Google I/O 2024. Google wants to bring more apps to cars, and it’s doing so with three tiers of apps:

• Car differentiated: Apps in this tier are specifically built to work with the variety of hardware in cars and can adapt their experience across driving and parked modes. They provide the best user experience designed for the different screens in the car, like the center console, instrument cluster, and additional screens—like panoramic displays that we see in many premium vehicles.
• Car optimized: These apps will have some car-specific engineering to include capabilities that can be used across driving or parked modes, depending on the app’s category.
• Car ready: Apps in this tier are large-screen compatible and can be enabled while the car is parked, with no additional work from the developer.

The Car-ready program is the third tier that essentially brings tablet-optimized apps over to your car. The idea is to reduce the barrier to entry for app developers — as long as your app is tablet-optimized, it can be used in parked vehicles. There are still some checks in place, as Google said it will proactively review large-screen compatible mobile apps to ensure safety and compatibility in cars. If the app qualifies, Google will automatically opt it in for distribution on cars with Google built-in and make it available in Android Auto, without needing further work from the app developer.

Google said then that the program would start with parked app categories like video, gaming, and browsers and that it plans to expand to other app categories in the future. It was supposed to roll out in the “coming months,” and with the above change spotted in the Google Play Store, it seems we’re just around the corner for rollout.