00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Android Auto may soon let you place widgets on your car’s dashboard.
00:03 – C. Scott Brown: And Android 17 could let you use Google Maps on your phone’s always on display.
00:08 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:09 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown, and this is the Authority Insights Podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:18 – Mishaal Rahman: So, we recently found evidence that Google is working on a major expansion to the Android Auto dashboard experience. The company might let you soon add widgets directly from your phone onto the dashboard, giving you a lot more choice over what information you want to see at a glance.
00:34 – C. Scott Brown: And meanwhile, we’ve spotted clues that the next major version of Android, probably to be known as Android 17, will let apps integrate with your phone’s AOD. So, apps will be able to show you specialized minimal interfaces that allow you to view key information at a glance. And lastly, we’ve got some more bad news for mobile gamers who are considering buying the Pixel 10.
00:59 – Mishaal Rahman: It feels like we’re just getting bad news after bad news after bad news on the Pixel 10, you know. It’s kind of easy to hyperfocus on the bad aspects, but of course, most users will probably be just fine, but if you are really into gaming, you might have some disappointments with the Pixel 10.
01:16 – C. Scott Brown: As a guy who runs a YouTube channel centered on the Pixel phone and is colloquially known as the Pixel guy, yeah, you know, sometimes it hurts talking about these things.
01:29 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, before we talk about the bad news, let’s start off with some pretty good news. So, we discovered recently that Google is working on bringing home screen widgets to Android Auto. So, we found evidence our Authority Insight team, as usual, AssembleDebug in collaboration with Adamya, who wrote up this article on our website, saying that Google is developing a new feature code named Earth in the Android Auto application. And this will allow you to literally add widgets to the home screen of your Android Auto dashboard. So this will create a split screen view with the widget appearing on one side of the dashboard. And in order to add a widget, you’ll have to go to the Android Auto app. There’ll be a — it’s not going to be called customize Earth as it is right now in this demo because it’s still in development — but through this settings app in the Android Auto on your phone, you’ll be able to add widgets, you’ll be able to scroll through the widgets that you have installed and select a widget to be displayed on the Android Auto dashboard. And as for what it’ll look like, we have some representative screenshots here. We see we added the Spotify widget. This is the Google Clock widget, you can see it’s kind of comically oversized, kind of cut off the timer and the start and stop button. You also see you have the music, YouTube Music Turntable widget that actually fits quite nicely. Clearly still a work in progress. You see we have the Gemini widget here on the left, Google Calendar, surprisingly fits pretty well despite how cramped it is. Google Weather, and another widget that notably if you try to tap on any of the widgets right now, it fails to launch the app because Android Auto doesn’t allow you to actually launch full applications. You’re only allowed to launch specialized applications. So, Scott, do you use Android Auto on a daily basis? Like what do you think of this feature? What do you think of widgets coming to the home screen?
03:14 – C. Scott Brown: So I do use Android Auto all the time. and I do want to clarify that there are probably people thinking to themselves, wait a minute, Android Auto already supports widgets. So what the widgets that work currently in Android Auto only appear on the taskbar. So just for clarity, these are widgets that appear in the main area of the Android Auto screen where your maps, you know, would usually be. As far as we know, the taskbar widgets aren’t going away. They’ll continue to exist, but these are much more indepth and also much more customizable. I love it. I’m super excited about this. I think this is going to be something that’s going to make, you know, driving in my car feel more like an experience that I curate because right now Android Auto is fairly restrictive on what, you know, your screen looks like and what, you know, information you can have at a glance. You know, for example, with the current widget setup, I can have my music player on the bottom instead of seeing a bunch of apps and then I can have the maps above it. But yeah, if I wanted a calendar, if I wanted, you know, maybe a photo. We haven’t seen a widget for Google photos, but that seems like something that could be pretty easily thrown in there. Maybe just a scrolling, you know, every one minute it refreshes and it just shows a picture of, you know, family and friends and stuff like that. Like that’s cool. Like that makes your driving experience much more personal to, you know, to you the driver. So yeah, I’m all for this. I think that if assuming that it can be executed properly. Right now it’s a hot mess, but, you know, obviously that’s why it’s not out. Like they’re still working on it. But yeah, but hopefully by the time it does come out, it’ll be something a lot better than this. But yeah, if they can refine it, I think this is awesome.
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