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A Novel Plugin-Based Navigation Architecture for Multi-Brand, Multi-Screen Automotive Systems

Authors:

Ronak Indrasinh Kosamia rkosamia0676@ucumberlands.edu 0009-0004-4997-4225

Abstract— In the rapidly evolving landscape of automotive infotainment, providing a robust, modular, and easily extensible architecture is paramount. This article presents a plugin manager approach for multi-brand, multi-screen navigation— aimed at automotive software built on top of Android and its Jetpack (including Compose) toolchain. As automotive OEMs increasingly demand brand-specific user experiences, developers often struggle with proliferating “if-else” conditionals, duplicated code, and tangled navigation logic. Traditional solutions, such as static route-based frameworks or theming engines, tend to buckle under the complexity of dynamic brand overrides. Meanwhile, adopting monolithic plugin architectures like OSGi or Eclipse RCP can be excessive and poorly tailored to Android’s modern ecosystem. To address these challenges, we propose a centralized plugin manager that orchestrates brand-specific screens via discreet plugin modules. Each plugin encapsulates the unique UI and navigation flow required by a given brand, whether it’s Volkswagen, Audi, or newer entrants to the market. At runtime, the plugin manager intercepts navigation requests, identifies the appropriate brand, and dynamically dispatches the user to the correct composable screen. This architecture not only curtails code duplication but also simplifies the on-ramp for new brand introductions: engineers simply drop-in new plugin classes—optionally annotated for automated registration using Kotlin Symbol Processing—without editing extensive branching logic. Our approach draws inspiration from well-known software patterns like Factory Pattern for the creation and retrieval of brand- specific plugin instances, Strategy Pattern for encapsulating brand-driven behaviors under a uniform BasePlugin interface and Annotation-Driven Patterns (e.g., KSP) for compile-time discovery and streamlined registration of these plugins. We also compare the plugin manager solution to alternative navigation techniques like Multi-module Gradle projects that manually swap resources per brand, Reflection-based override approaches prone to runtime overhead and poor type safety, and and Pure theming solutions that lack the flexibility to alter entire UI flows. The plugin manager approach offers a cleaner, more scalable middle ground—particularly relevant to the 90% of automotive stacks running on Android, where Jetpack Compose and Kotlin are increasingly becoming the de facto standards for creating intuitive, high-performance in-vehicle experiences. In short, this article offers actionable guidance for software architects and developers wrestling with the demands of multi-brand automotive infotainment. By marrying proven design patterns with Android’s latest technologies, the plugin manager framework facilitates rapid expansion, reduces maintenance overhead, and empowers OEMs to elevate brand identity without sacrificing software maintainability. Through prototypes and real-world scenarios, we illustrate how this architecture effectively integrates into large-scale automotive programs, aligning with broader trends in modular software design and responding to the complexities of an ever-more diversified mobility marketplace.

Keywords—automotive OEMs, OSGi, Eclipse RCP, KSP, Annotation-Driven Patterns, Jetpack compose, Factory and Strategy patterns, Reflection Override, Plugins Manager.