Wilson CarPlay
When Apple announced that parking apps would be added to CarPlay, we worked with Wilson Parking and Kombu to design and build the functionality into the Wilson Parking app while iOS 14 was still in beta.
year
2020
industry
Automotive, Tech
Services
CarPlay, Native App Development
As our mobile phones continue to integrate with our lives, companies like Apple find better ways for us to use them. CarPlay, first released in 2014, is “a smarter, safer way to use your iPhone while you drive” and is now available in most new cars in Australia. It streamlines how we play music, listen to podcasts, navigate, send messages, make calls, and run Shortcuts in the car. Now it has improved how we book parking.
When it was rumoured iOS 14 would introduce EV Charging, Parking, and Quick Food Ordering to the list of supported CarPlay apps, we began talking with Wilson Parking and Kombu about adding CarPlay to the popular Wilson Parking app. As soon as the iOS 14 beta dropped in July 2020, we started developing a prototype.
Building the app in React Native while iOS 14 was still in development was challenging. Each new beta release saw changes that required code rewrites, and in one case broke the app until the next beta update. But our crack team of developers had a version of the app to demo to Wilson by the time iOS 14 was launched at the end of September.
(You can read more about the development process in our blog post, Enhance Existing Apps with CarPlay.)
Our friends at Kombu spent a lot of time considering how the app should work to deliver an optimised in-car experience within the constraints of CarPlay. Apple has specific guidelines as well as technical constraints that must be factored into an app’s design, such as screen types and layouts, navigation patterns and how to manage errors with minimal friction.
Kombu designed user flows for all of the CarPlay features to ensure we’d covered a variety of use cases within a simple and intuitive experience.
Short of parking a car in the office, we needed to upgrade our infrastructure to enable us to test CarPlay features. We purchased a Kenwood Digital Multimedia Receiver head unit and a power supply to convert mains power to DC for the device, and set it up in our office. This allowed us to quickly test features without a car. However, in-car testing was still crucial to test edge cases like lack of network connectivity, poor GPS coverage, and to observe how the app handled a variety of real world situations arising from continuous movement or use throughout the city and suburbs.
A new version of Wilson Parking was successfully soft launched at the end of February 2021 to further test the app and gather feedback. Within days there were several customers using it every day to book parking. We formally released the app on the 8th of March.
Wilson Parking’s CarPlay app makes it simple for customers that book regularly through the Wilson Parking app, and drivers that want to avoid the hassle of researching and comparing car parks and rates. The app shows the driver up to 12 of the nearest car parks on their car's display, including the car park name, rates and location. Once a car park is selected, commuters can seamlessly link to Apple Maps to navigate to their chosen car park.
The Book Again function allows customers that regularly use the Wilson Parking app to quickly view and book their previously booked car parks to make routine journeys even more convenient.
The Wilson Parking app with CarPlay is available in the App Store.
