Removing Friction: Why Frictionless Content Beats the App Store

Your car is not a Smart TV. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it, because the industry keeps building like it forgot.

Here's where the confusion actually starts, though. In-car entertainment didn't invent a new business model. It borrowed one. Connected TV figured out the pieces years ago: a device maker, a handful of app stores, a shared screen, content owners fighting for a spot on it. Swap "device maker" for OEM and the picture barely changes.

Except it does change, in one important way. CTV is a young market sitting on a mature industry, consumer electronics. In-car is a young market sitting on top of one of the oldest, slowest-moving industries there is. That mismatch is the whole story.

An established industry, colliding with a market still being born

Automotive has a century of supply chains, regulation, and platform cycles behind it. In-car entertainment has none of that. It's improvising in real time, and the result is huge level of fragmentation

One OEM brand can run 2 or 3 different app stores across a single model line. It depends on the market it's sold in, the year it rolled off the line, or which infotainment generation happens to sit under the dashboard that week. Same badge on the car. Completely different content experience depending on where and when you bought it.

That's a genuinely hard problem to solve on the OEM side, and an even harder one for content partners trying to reach drivers through it. Big barrier to entry, both directions. Nobody here is being lazy, the complexity is real.

Does the app store actually do the job?

Say an OEM solves the fragmentation anyway. Say the app store is live, the icons are there, streaming apps are pre-installed from day one. Box ticked. App store shipped. Adoption numbers go into the deck.

Is that actually doing the job? Is a driver finding an icon and tapping through a login screen the thing that builds a habit, or the thing that makes them open the store once, shrug, and go back to mirroring their phone instead?

We believe it's the second one. When OEMs lean on mirroring, or bury content behind app store workflows, they hand the whole moment away. They lose the chance to shape what the in-car experience actually feels like as their brand. And they lose visibility into what drivers do once they're in there, along with the recurring revenue that comes from owning that behaviour instead of hosting someone else's app icon.

Winning that moment back means building around content. Not apps.

What happens when you take the app store away

This isn't a hunch. We have a live project that tested it directly.

Making content available in the car is only half the job. The other half is making sure a viewing habit actually forms, and that's the part most app store strategies quietly skip.

Picture the moment a driver taps the screen. Option one: a wall of app icons. One for news, one for kids, one for live sports, each its own tiny decision before anything plays. That's not a moment that builds a habit. That's a moment that trains a driver to stop looking.

Option two: one centralized hub. Everything already organised, already there, one tap away. No decision about which app to open first, because there's only one place to look.

We'd like to share data from one of our own projects in Europe. It backs up the case plainly: frictionless access to content is what makes in-car entertainment actually work.

Here is what it looks like in practice:  

• App-open to content-play conversion runs at 66% year to date, and hit 70.9% in the most recent week. Industry data on installed mobile apps puts the equivalent figure at roughly 25%. A quarter of all app installs are opened once and never produce a second real session, per UXCam's 2026 mobile engagement data. Not a perfectly like-for-like comparison, single-session installs measure a different funnel stage, but the direction is honest: most apps struggle to get anyone to come back at all.

• The step count matters. On this platform: tap the icon, browse, play. No login, no signup, no payment screen. The app store alternative, per provider: find it in the store, download and install, create an account or sign in, often enter payment details, then browse, then play. That gap repeats for every additional provider a driver wants. It matters more behind the wheel than almost anywhere else.

• Over half of engaged drivers, 53.6%, use two or more content providers on the platform, averaging 2.17 distinct providers per device. If a bundle only ever got used like a single app, this number would sit near zero. It doesn't.

• Returning-opener share, drivers who come back and open the platform again, climbed from 26% at launch to 66% by early summer. Zero re-entry friction. Nothing to log into, nothing to cancel, nothing to manage.

The real alternative isn't a better app

Your car isn't a Smart TV, and it isn't a phone either. Drivers don't want to shop for content behind the wheel, they want it there the second they tap the screen.

That's the whole argument. Everything else is just the industry taking the long way round.