The question of whether Tesla is working on an app store arose after the last update to version 11 of Tesla’s car interface in December, when Tesla introduced a customizable icon bar at the bottom of the touch screen.
This led some to speculate that company CEO Elon Musk might announce the apps initiative at the company’s latest earnings call in late January, but this never came to pass.
Now, the view that Tesla may already be developing an app store has gained more traction, after Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, retweeted a video of Steve Jobs introducing the App Store.
But what’s interesting about the tweet is what Sawyer Merritt wrote: “Something similar is rumored to be coming soon to something with four wheels starting with T“. Without being Sherlock Holmes, we can assume that he is referring to Tesla cars.
This was quickly refuted by Teslascope: “The rumor has come to light! Tesla has been working on its own App Store since May 2021 and it will launch before the Cybertruck deliveries. This is what we expected to be shared during the earnings call“.
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Creating your own app store could be quite interesting, as well as being a new way of generating revenue for Tesla, assuming your store system will work like the competition: charging 20 or 30% commission to developers for each sale.
Also, we can imagine this could be a future smart car thing, like Apple, which is supposedly working on its own car. Perhaps this could be a feature that in the future is more normal: create the car and create the operating system.