1. A method for negotiating control of a shared audio or visual resource of an automobile, the method comprising: receiving at an arbiter a request for control of a shared audio or visual resource of a vehicle, wherein the arbiter maintains existing state information for ownership of the shared audio or visual resource and ownership transition conditions of the shared audio or visual resource, and the request for control of the shared audio or visual resource of the vehicle is received from one of a plurality of processes comprising a process executing on an embedded system of the vehicle and a process executing on a mobile computing device temporarily communicating with the vehicle, wherein the ownership transition conditions are configured such that only one of the plurality of processes can claim ownership of the shared audio or visual resource at any given point in time; determining new state information regarding ownership of the shared audio or visual resource, wherein the determining the new state information comprises determining the new state information based at least in part on the request for control and the ownership transition conditions, and the new state information indicates which of the processes controls output of the shared audio or visual resource of the vehicle; and communicating to a controller interface of the shared audio or visual resource the new state information.