Kinda sucks android atuo is s google feature rather than an android feature
Yeah I really wish there was some sort of other option.
Sometimes I don’t think Google even care about Android car experience at all, even Google Maps somehow always bugs out at the most inconvenient times when you are driving.
It will not let me remove an address near my house that is not my house. It is the first option all day every day. It’s so annoying.
Also no YouTube implementation, you’d imagine background playback would be supported
I can’t even use google maps. Just doesn’t show up.
The whole app is recycled dogshit. Songs freeze, half the time it won’t recognize my phone and the list goes on.
I had those issues but they went away after I got a shorter USB cord.
Might have to give that a whirl. Thanks!
Yeah, unfortunately it seems that the Google “can’t care to test updates” has been extended from some edge services to their main ones and only keeps on growing.
I hate to say it but my issues with Android Auto are part of what pushed me to trying out iPhone again. Haven’t had any issues with CarPlay.
Been an android guy forever until this year and car play is SO much better. I figured the touch screen in my Kia was just a little slow and shitty. It wasn’t. It was my pixel 7. Car play is so fast and responsive in comparison.
Not sure what everyone else is doing, I use Android Auto constantly for work on a lot of rental cars without issue. The bugginess is probably crap cables or old phones, check those.
Google is notorious for A/B testing (usually a good idea) so they roll out changes in batches and look at telemetry for any changes in user behaviour. You might just be the lucky late adopter for those changes that someone tested for you a month earlier.
Well that’s presumptive. I use a Pixel 7 in a 2022 vehicle. When I plug it in I have to open the USB settings EVERY TIME and switch to MIDI before it recognizes the device. I have bugs with Waze, and my music will pause regularly with no connection issues.
This is more of a workaround than a fix, but you can change the default USB configuration in the developer settings.
Thank you! I’ll try that out.
I bought a new cable just to use it in a rental car. I had to keep switching between Bluetooth and the cable because my music would only work on one and maps on the other. Then the phone wouldn’t work while charging, so I just drove in silence for hours so it wouldn’t die on me because then I’d be really lost. After multiple rental cars and multiple cables, I’ve never had even a decent experience with it and it pisses me off to no end. It just crosses the line into actually being dangerous on top of being inconvenient.
I know it might not be helpful, but, I’ve experienced bad USB slots in the rental cars. I’m sure they got a lot of abuse.
Yeah I remember having issues only once and I’m pretty sure that was Waze rather than Android Auto.
I HATE android auto… it is constantly crashing. I wish they would just QA the software or something.
It’s more likely that auto manufacturers put the oldest shittest slowest chips in cars that crash constantly because they can’t handle any load at all.
Isn’t the whole point of android auto that it uses your phone and the display is just an external display when in that mode?
Still requires overhead and a non-zero number of head units are built on, this may shock you, Android.
My experience has been that anything on QNX works fine, and anything else is hit or miss.
How do you find what platforms run on QNX? I’d prefer that on my car over other options.
You’d have to look it up for your make and model, but previous gen Hyundai Kia Genesis tend to run on QNX. Don’t know what the new gen runs on.
Apparently some head units even run Linux!
Hyundai Mobis head units for Kia run on Android 11 from what I’ve seen. Unless they’ve changed to QNX
Yep, current eCMP platform by stellantis e.g. runs Linux and containers per “application” (radio, nav, backup camera…) for their nav capable head unit. Those are made by Continental and are called NAC, current gen is WAVE4.
I use android auto in numerous rental cars. Some head units are so slow to process taps or menu selections that it is pretty much unusable.
The normal headunit UI is generally ok, so either there’s a whole lot of overhead for android auto, or some programmer simply dropped the base example implementation of it into the system and did zero work at optimising it.
Personally, I’m betting that it’s the latter. “Supports Android Auto” box has been ticked on the feature sheet, send it.
Had to go through four USB cables in my car before one worked reliably with my current phone. A “10Gbit/s certified” USB-C cable did the trick, plus two layers of aluminum tape on the lower outer side of the car side USB plug to make the connection less wiggly.
The phone before that worked fine with any cable, but apparently some combinations of head unit and phone have relatively thin error margins on the actual physical layer of the connection.
Happened to me once.
I hit the home button on the headunit to dump out of Android Auto back to the headunit’s UI, went back into AA, and it reappeared.
Hasn’t happened again since.
Android auto and always been a buggy mess. I was very disappointed when I first tried to use it, and the consecutive two months, until eventually I gave up and went back to normal bluetooth
Vast majority of the time my AA works fine. I use Waze 99% of the time. Occasionally double check through Maps. I use PowerAmp as my music player. All my music is on my phone, not a streaming service.
