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Comment by francis-io | Hacker News Reader

My expirence with Android Auto in my Skoda Fabia 2019 is patchy already. The connection stopped working in the past year for a few months, now it only connects to my in car screen partly, and spotify wont load.

I love the idea of keeping in-car entertainment on my mobile, so I can get updates. In practice, my car will get left behind eventually and I'll be stuck with a dumb screen in my dashboard.

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Does your car support wireless Android Auto? If not, try switching to a different cable. The push to wireless is because people are having all sorts of problems with patchy cables and then blame it on Android/phone/Google. Too bad only very recent cars support it. Mine does, it works great.

100% on the cable. I had 10 or so laying around that all didn't work but I could hook up to my PC just fine. Thought it was my old phone at the time. I bought this one and problem solved: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G12WYCG

In case it doesn't, I can really recommend AAWireless [1]. I have it in my 2021 Zoe because the cable was quite awkward with my phone and it's super annoying to always plug it in.

[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/aawireless#/

I can confirm AAWireless works fine - got it for my 2020 Volvo XC60 and it works without any issues. The only problem is that due to chip shortages their waitlist for one is very long currently.

Does wireless Android Auto require a wifi unit inside the HU (wireless Apple CarPlay does)? This seems to be one of the main blockers to adoption by OEMs. AFAIK, in the US, only BMW has implemented wireless CarPlay/AndroidAuto across most of it's lineup.

Edit - also, 100% agree on the cable. From my experience, if a cable is at all worn, it stops working in the car, even if it works just fine for charging or data transfer in the home.

Yes, of course it needs WiFi. Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth to carry the video stream.

Well, you say "of course" - I'm not sure how that's so obvious. Bluetooth can easily do 1mbps, and that's enough to send some encoded video, which AA does anyway, even with a cable connection the display gets really fully of artifacts and choppy sometimes, whatever compression they are using struggles. If you limited the number of updates per second I'm sure it would be fine over bluetooth alone.

Phone support is a bigger problem from my experience. Exact same setup in my car works flawlessly with some phone models and has any number of issues with others.

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