Connected vehicle apps, dealership platforms, fleet tools and service scheduling. Automotive software has a constraint most industries do not: the device moves, the connection drops, and the data still has to be right when it reconnects.
Remote status, lock and climate control
Search, VDP pages and lead capture
Booking, reminders and status updates
Vehicle tracking, utilisation and maintenance
Trip data, driver behaviour and diagnostics
Range, charger discovery and session management
Phone-as-key and shared access
Reservation, handover and return flows
Queue, retry and reconcile: vehicles drive out of coverage
High-frequency vehicle data stored and queried affordably
Authenticated, auditable, idempotent remote commands
Location and background work that does not drain the phone
Geofencing and trip reconstruction that survives GPS drift
Dealer stock that reflects what is actually on the lot
Location history is sensitive: consent and retention matter
CarPlay and Android Auto constraints are strict by design
Ranges, not quotes. Scope, integrations and compliance work move these, so the number we give you after a discovery call is the one that means something.
A focused MVP on one use case runs $50,000-$95,000. A full platform with mobile apps and telematics or inventory integration runs $95,000-$180,000. Connected-vehicle work with remote commands, high-volume telemetry and in-car surfaces runs $180,000-$300,000+. Vehicle data access is the variable that moves the estimate most, because what an OEM or aggregator exposes differs sharply by make and model year.
Through an aggregator such as Smartcar, through an OEM's own connected-car programme where you have that relationship, or through OBD-II hardware. Coverage is uneven: a given command, remote lock, say, may be supported on some makes and model years and not others. We establish the actual coverage matrix for your target vehicles during discovery rather than assuming parity.
We treat disconnection as normal rather than exceptional. Commands queue with explicit pending states the user can see, telemetry buffers on-device and uploads in batches on reconnect, and anything that writes is idempotent so a retry after a dropped response does not double-apply. The app should never show a confident state it cannot verify.
Yes, within what Apple and Google permit. Both platforms restrict which app categories may appear and tightly constrain the interface: you use their templates, not custom layouts, and driver-distraction rules limit interaction depth. That is a hard boundary worth designing around early, since a rich phone UI does not port over.
Four to five months for an MVP, six to ten for a full platform, ten to sixteen for connected-vehicle or fleet work. Real-vehicle field testing is not compressible: connectivity and battery behaviour only show up in actual driving, so we budget several weeks for it.
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you what it takes — scope, timeline and the parts that usually go wrong.