Aupeo

» see aupeo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Aupeo did not die on a phone. It died in about five million cars.

That is the only reason it is worth a headstone. Berlin, 2008, venture money, personalized internet radio with around 120 prebuilt stations you could pick by mood or seed from an artist. There were a hundred products doing that and most of them are gone without anyone noticing. What made this one different is that it got into the dashboard, and the dashboard is the one place where a piece of software can acquire millions of users who never made a decision about it.

I never opened it, and neither did most of the people counted as its users. Mini shipped it in 2010 and then BMW and Mercedes and Toyota and Ford followed, and it was the first audio app to work with Volkswagen cars over MirrorLink. In Turkey the connected-app tier of any of those cars was either absent or a menu item nobody ever went into. It was available in more than sixty countries by 2015, which is a sentence that means considerably less than it looks like when the delivery mechanism is a car you have to buy first.

~ the case file ~

~ where it actually lived ~

The catalog was around 900,000 tracks as of November 2011, which was respectable and not remarkable. The stations were curated by genre and mood rather than generated the way Pandora generated them, and there were about 120 of them ready to go before you touched anything.

Phone apps existed for everything including Symbian and Windows Phone, and they are not why the name is on this list. Car integration is slow, unglamorous work. You spend two years qualifying with one manufacturer, your software ships inside a model year, and then it sits in that vehicle for a decade whether a single owner ever presses the button or not. Aupeo did that work when nobody else wanted to, and it is the only reason a Berlin startup with no consumer brand ended up with distribution that consumer brands never get.

~ what panasonic bought ~

Panasonic acquired Aupeo in April 2013. Panasonic builds automotive infotainment head units, so this was not the purchase of a music service. It was the purchase of a content layer to sit on top of hardware Panasonic was already selling to car manufacturers, and the collaboration had been announced publicly before the acquisition closed.

For a while it worked exactly as intended. By 2015 the numbers were twenty brands and five million vehicles across more than sixty countries. Then the thing that kills every embedded in-car service showed up, and it was the phone. CarPlay landed in 2014 and Android Auto in 2015, and both of them said the same sentence to every head unit maker in the industry: you are a screen now, and the music arrives from somebody's pocket.

~ the day the dashboards went quiet ~

The notice went out on 28 October 2016 and the public service stopped on 30 November. About a month, for something embedded in vehicles that would keep being driven for another fifteen years. Audi drivers were told they would keep their access, which is its own small piece of evidence about who the real customer had been all along.

This is the part with no clean answer. When a phone app shuts down you delete it and forget the icon existed. When a service baked into a car shuts down, the menu item stays in the screen and the thing behind it is gone, and nobody is going to recall a vehicle over a dead radio app. Most of the drivers who found out found out by pressing it.

The code itself did not die. Panasonic carried it forward as OneConnect and kept selling it to manufacturers, which is the ordinary fate of a startup bought for its plumbing. The name went away, the public front door closed, and the five million cars kept driving around with a button on the wheel that no longer reached anything.

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