I got bored while looking at my lunch today, and instead of actually doing work, I instead decided to look through the Google Play store. Looking at the top charts, I got curious about the devices they had, wondering what the top paid item for TV was (it's a downloader with ten ratings, by the way). Instead, I found something significantly funnier.

GOOGLE PLAY STORE FOR CAR???

In retrospect, this is not too much of a surprise—it makes sense for a car to be able to install apps for things such as Spotify or Waze. Android is a versatile operating system, it makes sense why a car would run it for their center console. I don’t know who would use this over connecting their phone over Bluetooth (do you have to keep a separate data subscription for your car if you use this??), but it makes some sense to me that there is something allowing you to look at your route on Google Maps natively in cars.

What does not make sense to me is the amount of stuff that is not that.

Firstly, streaming services. This is fine. It makes sense for somebody to want to use the big screen in their car for watching stuff while they’re parked. Special shoutouts to HBO Max with an astounding 2.2 star rating on their car version! You would expect these apps to be quality over quantity, considering there’s only 183 apps available right now, but it appears that there’s neither. Generally, most of these car software’s ratings are pretty low, mostly ranging from 3.8 all the way down to 1.8. And that’s if the apps even have any reviews at all!

Second, the cars can download games. Currently, the number one downloaded game is… Beach Buggy Racing 2.

They put a fucking racing game in the car!! It’s not even controlled by the steering wheel or anything (probably because that’s a terrible idea), it’s literally just controlled via touchscreen. Or a controller, I suppose, if you choose to bring a controller into your car and plug it in in order to play…

…this.

I cannot tell who this is for. A parent sitting in the car with a child that forgot to bring their tablet, trying to keep them quiet while they make a phone call?? That’s the only actual use case I can see for this app, other than as a tech demo showcasing “Wow, you can play video games on your car!” But I suppose I don’t need to worry about demographics, because it has over 100,000 downloads!

That’s not even the only game, there’s quite a few—most of them are for kids, but they do have a few bangers in there. Who’s hopping on Angry Birds for Automotive with me? 👀

it's only a dollar! what a steal!

Also, somebody ported a SNES emulator to it. I may have been too dismissive of bringing a controller into the car, because that is kinda sick. Lowkey wish there were more emulators though, purely because it’d be very funny to play Intellivision games on a Ford F-150.

There’s also Zoom, released in May of this year. I mean, cars are made for zooming, so this isn’t a shock. None of these cars have cameras, so you’re kind of losing the video functionality of the video call, but, y’know, tradeoffs.

Other notable apps are 'Rain' and 'Ocean' labeled under “Entertainment”, the Ohio State University app for some reason, an AI generated fairy tales app with promotional images showing a whopping four stories, and, most exciting of all, a slots app.

I think we should go back to trains.