Ford’s press event was a little lower key than some of the others today. After a recap on the values of Ford they talked about the new Ford Developer Program, developer.ford.com is a single point for developers to work with the Sync APIs and create smartphone apps that work with Ford’s vehicles.
On the developer website there is sample code, emulators and forums. AppLink is license free and royalty free. Ford are going to approve apps and they explicitly said no apps that could distract a driver like games or videos apps would be approved. There are SDKs for iOS and Android but not Windows Phone. During the press conference an app that won a Ford developer contest BeCouply was shown, the new iPhone app using AppLink which make searching for places to go on dates from the car.
Plenty of new Content providers were shown off: Wall Street Journal Live and USA Today which are on-demand news apps that uses AppLink for control and listening to news articles. There was aha radio which is an audio content aggregator, US local radio stations and Rhapsody music streaming, Kaliki which is a magazine app which reads out magazines with a real human narrator.
Amazon Cloud player was announced for AppLink so if you store you music in Amazon’s cloud you have access to all your music in your car via a Smartphone app, this should work now with Ford vehicles that support AppLink.
Also shown was Glympse, the location sharing app where you can share you current location with friends or family so no more texting to say you’re stuck in traffic.
Ford are still promising to launch app link in Europe in the next year, I am sure I was due in the UK in 2012 but it looks like it will be 2013 at least.
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