GoKawiilAndy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR Android Auto currently only has limited taskbar widget support.
Last year we spotted Google working on new home screen widget support, codenamed “Earth.”
The rough UI we saw at the time has received a major overhaul, hinting that it’s nearing completion.
Android Auto has been stepping into the spotlight a little more frequently than usual lately, finding itself on the receiving end of big changes like its recent Gemini rollout. Another major upgrade we’ve been tracking for a while now concerns efforts to bring support for Android widgets to Auto’s dashboard. And while that’s still not quite ready to go, we’ve got some updates to share on Google’s progress.
When we brought you a preview of how widget support was coming together last fall, everything was more than a little rough around the edges — honestly, as we should only expect from what’s still a very much still in-development feature. Besides many widgets themselves not behaving correctly on the Auto dash, the interface we had for setting them up was really awkward, and felt like the sort of cobbled-together UI we’d never expect to see the light of day in a finished feature. The good news there: It won’t, and Google has already crafted a much more refined interface.
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Looking through Android Auto version 16.8.161804-release.daily, we’re able to see a lot of progress. For starters, at last check-in, Google hadn’t even given this support a proper name, and was still referring to it by its codename, Earth.
That’s now replaced by the much more sensible “Car widgets” label, complete with a nice description.
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