building stereaux: apple music for cars that apple forgot

got some new wheels recently. nice car, google built-in, big screen on the dash. figured apple would have an app for playing music. they do not.

your options are: use carplay (defeats the purpose of having a built-in system), use spotify (no), or just don't listen to apple music in your car. none of these were acceptable.

the intel problem

turns out the head unit runs an intel x86 chip. this matters because apple's musickit sdk for android only supports arm64. great news for my other car with its snapdragon head unit. less great for the one i just bought.

so we did what any reasonable person would do: built an apple music client that runs on both architectures. same ui, same ux, same features. just works.

feature parity, then some

the goal was simple: match what the official ios app does. library access, search, playlists, queue management, all the basics. steering wheel controls, voice commands, background playback. the stuff you'd expect.

then we started using it.

turns out sometimes you don't know what you want to listen to. you just want "something chill for the drive home" or "90s stuff that isn't overplayed." so we added ai playlist generation. describe a vibe, get a mix. it's genuinely useful.

looking the part

one thing that always bugged me about third-party car apps: they look like phone apps stretched onto a car screen. jarring. your car interior is all leather and brushed aluminum and ambient lighting, then you open an app and it's material design with a purple accent color.

we added a theming system. themes that match your car manufacturer's style. volvo gets the scandinavian minimalism. polestar gets the performance edge. light mode for sunny drives, dark mode for night shifts.

the goal: an app that feels like it came with the car.

designed for driving

safety matters. big touch targets. simplified navigation. pinned playlists in the sidebar so you're not digging through menus at 70mph. optional voice search so you can keep your eyes on the road.

we're not trying to recreate the full apple music experience. we're trying to make the driving music experience better than what apple offers. roadtrips and music go hand in hand. might as well do it properly.

coming soon

stereaux is coming to the play store soon. arm64 and x86. volvo, polestar, ford, gmc, whoever else ships cars with google built-in.

because apple won't do it, so we did.