C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Morgan Stanley’s new Audio Entertainment Survey identifies Android Auto’s penetration among streamers decreasing in 2024.
- Apple and CarPlay are up slightly, but not enough to account for all of Auto’s losses.
- Overall, listeners are slowly shifting away from traditional radio, but its dominance continues.
Android, as a whole, has been a huge success, and the versatile platform has found a home on everything from our phones to our wrists. But there are still areas where Android’s influence feels a little shaky, and probably one of the more uncertain spaces it occupies is in our vehicles. Granted, we have Android Auto, Android Automotive, and even Google Built-in, but car manufacturers can be notoriously controlling when it comes to the experiences their vehicles are compatible with. Even as companies like Hyundai signal their support, the future of Android in cars is far from certain, and now some new statistics give us further reason to be concerned.
The information we’re looking at arrives via a somewhat surprising source, as it pops up in Morgan Stanley’s latest Audio Entertainment Survey, shared by smartphone analyst Max Weinbach on X earlier this week (via 9to5Google). We’ll circle back to some of the interesting listening trends that report identifies in a moment, but from a platform perspective the big takeaway here is that CarPlay usage is slightly up among audio streamers (to the tune of about 2%), while Android Auto’s share is down a whole 7%.
While it’s possible that part of that shift stems from varying listening habits, and drivers choosing options like FM radio over IP-based streaming, it still doesn’t look great for Android Auto. That said, this is still only one data point, and before we start panicking about an Android Auto exodus, we’ll definitely want to see how that number moves further over time.
OK, enough Android Auto doom and gloom! What other cool stats are in this data?
According to this survey, drivers just aren’t listening to nearly as much music in their vehicles as they used to, with popularity dropping from 45% in 2017 to just 27% last year. But when they do, they’re slowly moving away from radio and choosing more and more streaming options. As you can clearly see above, though, there’s still a long way to go there before radio is defeated — it dropped a mere 3% over the course of the past year.
While it doesn’t make it onto this chart, TikTok for in-car entertainment has been on the rise — but who knows how long that’s going to last? The long-threatened US ban looms over the streaming service, and unless something happens soon, TikTok could effectively shut down as of this Sunday.