Waze for Android Auto
blog.waze.com
blog.waze.com
I couldn't help but think "Get all this stuff off my screen so I can see where I'm going" followed by "If I actually paid attention to or used this app it'd get me killed".
I'm sure if I'd stopped and played with the settings I could've got it to a manageable level but I really couldn't see the point. You're driving, the social aspect is a dangerous and unnecessary one. Just get me from Point A to B the best you can. Back to Google Maps.
A great example - I really really don't need to know how many waze users are behind me, or driving the opposite direction, or hell - even in front of me. I also don't need 3-4 indicators on the screen showing the speed of traffic going the other way on the freeway. I only care about where I'm going and how quickly I can get there.
It gives pretty good directions most of the time, and reroutes gracefully. Works in many countries.
I don't like the UI though. It figures out you've stopped and as I glance to see the map, an add pops up over the top of the screen, which is anoying. Clicking on the bar on the bottom of the screen to "stop" or enter a new address never seems intuitive. Its workable though and good at finding locations by name.
One feature it has thats nice, is that you can send someone your route, and it will when your about 2 minutes out (alternatively they can watch your progress).
If I'm actually navigating to a place I don't know how to get to rather than commuting, I'll tend to use Google Maps instead. The display is much easier to read while I'm driving. And Waze's traffic avoidance routing is very aggressive, so it can sometimes suggest really stupid stuff. On my normal commute when I know all of the roads, I can easily tell it's trying to get me to do something stupid and ignore it. But in an area I don't know well, I'm more likely to unkowningly follow an illogical direction.
When you're a passenger, you can point out (and report) upcoming obstacles, amuse yourself looking at the little catcar bubbles, etc. They should probably make a quick "I am the driver/passenger" button, though.
This feature is so damn useful I'd still use waze even if it were a bash script.
Waze has probably saved me at least $1,000 in speeding fines, and has an almost uncanny ability to report upcoming hazards liked stopped cars or debris in the road. (Seriously, I can't believe how some car that just stopped is there)
Reading your comment is thoroughly confusing, since you really shouldn't be "looking" at waze while driving much since it talks to you the whole time. Adding an event is trivial, I mean I'm not sure how you could make it any more simple.
Unless you suffer from a specific condition preventing you from taking your eyes off a nearby screen I can't see how it would impact your driving any worse than any other GPS app
They've been talking about Waze for AA for over a year, so I'm guessing quite a bit of work had to be done to make this possible. In particular did they need to make any design changes to Waze to make it easier to use via the AA interface?
Unfortunately my 2016 vehicle only has mirrorlink v1.1+. Which unlike mirrorlink 1.0 doesn't actually mirror your phone, instead it is a proprietary app ecosystem with ten low quality paid for apps, even assuming any smartphone still supported mirrolink (which almost none do).
I wish there was just a single open standard in the vehicle industry. Toyota for example is refusing to do AA/Carplay and is starting yet another "standard" called SmartDeviceLink.
I love Toyota's vehicles (reliability, looks, features, safety, etc). But when our Prius V gets replaced, we won't even consider Toyota as their infotainment units are antiquated, voice recognition terrible, and smartphone connectivity non-existent.
Toyota reminds me a lot of Nintendo, in the sense that neither company really grasps how consumer behaviour has changed with smartphones, digital services, and the cloud. Toyota are literally losing sales due to their obstinance on this, all to save a few dollars in navigation upgrades.
Have you ever considered getting an aftermarket infotainment unit? Choosing a car by infotainment seems like the tail wagging the dog.
Both versions of the protocol stream apps rendered by the phone. v1.1 allows to create third party applications for it. Previously apps could be only provided by phone vendor. ML was never supposed to stream the screen of the phone constantly due to potential driver distraction. The devices that did this were probably uncertified and/or buggy.
> Toyota for example is refusing to do AA/Carplay and is starting yet another "standard" called SmartDeviceLink.
Well they do have a plenty of reason to not like AA/Carplay. Both give total control of head unit experience to Apple or Google. Which is a risky decision when you are dreaming about gradually moving from selling a product to providing related services.
Which is to say they give total control to the device the user already has and uses everywhere else, so that they get a consistent experience. Anything the auto vendor provides will never be able to match that.
It's a annoying system at this point. Unless I want to use it as a glorified, big interface for podcast control, it is of no use to me. It cannot run mandatory apps like Google Maps, doesn't have Waze and I am not using Apple Maps.
Also, I cannot play the podcasts when I am using Google Maps for directions. The Maps app is unable to give voice directions, the podcast acts up and soon one or the other of them is stuck.
I gave up and just use a bluetooth based connection to run both of these apps at the same time.
From the folks that use Android Auto with the car, many of the frustrations seem the same. It seems slightly better from a functionality standpoint, but less stable.
Waze may be the game changer. If only I could buy a cheap android phone and add it to my data plan without paying a ton of money extra each month...
I do wish that they would add the ability to have a real weather app in the ecosystem. After moving from the west coast to the midwest where they actually have real weather that can be spotty and fast moving it'd be really nice to be able to pull up an up-to-date weather radar view to see what's coming at me.
Now, there are the bugs....such as occasionally when I call someone it switches to the speaker on my phone vs. my car which is really annoying. It used to crash on a semi-occasional basis but I haven't seen that since I upgraded to a Pixel. Occasionally I do have to reboot the phone when it fails to connect. That is probably the most annoying one.
I've owned several cars thus far in my life, and so far, the functionality of every single head unit has been changed exactly zero times since the car left the line. When CDs became a thing, I had to add a CD player if I wanted to listen to them. When XM and Sirius came out, I had to add something to use them. Who knows what's going to come next? But if my phone is in the driver's seat, so to speak, then I can expect new updates just about every year now going forward, with new features coming this Fall with iOS 11. My 2017 Civic at least has a chance of being updated since the head unit runs Android underneath, but odds of Honda ever updating it are pretty slim.
Because it's probably required by law and for good reason - just like the Bluetooth systems disallow visually reading texts.
> The only potential advantage
The other one is that you are not endangering children and other humans alike while fiddling on a tiny phone screen.
Stop it.
I'm not sure how/why it would be required by law-- I could watch netflix on my cell phone while driving and have the audio stream over bluetooth if I wanted to; I don't see how CarPlay/AndroidAuto changes the legal framework here. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not sure HOW. Could even just be something so simple as fear of liability I guess. But again, the bluetooth example comes to mind.
It's a shame, because on iOS Maps is a pretty polished product and the team deserves credit for where they've come.
I lasted less than a day. It had no idea where I was at times, even on major roads. It would more often tell me to turn after the turn than before it.
I don't know anyone who has used both Google Maps and Apple Maps who would call the latter "quite good", so I suppose it's relative. If all I knew were Apple Maps, I'd probably agree with you.
I wouldn't be quite as annoyed by it if the damn navigation wasn't missing the address I need to enter damn near 50% of the time (in major cities too, in a 2016 model year car). One day I noticed they had a mobile app and assumed there'd be some easier way to enter navigation addresses from contacts, google maps, etc.. but no...its barely even functional.
But hey, I can check my stocks. so there's that?
Edit: I went on a little rant tangent there... Great work Waze team. I can't wait to be able to use this.
I also love how, in our 2014 Prius V, if the Bluetooth gets disconnected and there's another device in range, it won't let me reconnect to the original device until the car is stopped and put into park... Because no vehicle has a front seat passenger?
Which also happens to be the scenario which is most likely to cause this problem!
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/07/gm-to-offer-ota-softwar...
I'm sure you know that there is an unofficial Android Auto installation available on certain Mazda forums. Unfortunately, they still haven't managed to fix a serious issue with Bluetooth calling.
In addition, if they find you've tweaked the software, they won't honor any warranty claims concerning the infotainment system.
Today I think the direction Toyota is going in extremely ugly (too angular/aggressive for me).
I'm not buying another car without CarPlay. It's too nice.
But I agree, I bought mine for the motor as well, and really that's what's important to me. Would I like a better head unit, sure, but I'd make the same choice again.
I just wish Waze would come to CarPlay as well and Navdy.
I guess anyone wishing for Android Auto and CarPlay support will have to go the aftermarket route.
You don't need a built-in system, and in fact I find my phone [$130 Moto E4] coupled with a magnetic dash mount works far better.
There's no reason it should be all or nothing.
I care very slightly about the privacy implications (I'm already letting them track me sometimes so I can't be that concerned). What bothers me is that it continued to drain my battery to the point that my phone would have been dead before I got back to my car to head home.
Google/Apple maps do not seem to have this problem.
I don't mind contributing location data to the betterment of the app, it more comes down to a battery life and transparency issue.
Most notably: Literally everything about dealing with significant location changes when in the background/app is suspended. That entire dev team has some bad karma coming its way.
Google owns both and don't they share data on the backend between the two apps (e.g. Traffic data, etc)
It also warns you of speed and speed cameras on the road, which google maps doesn't do.
Why do they do it this way? Couldn't tell ya.
That's where it shines. Other than that It seems to eat a lot of battery and make my phone run hot so I stick with Google elsewhere.
You're not supposed to change lanes in an intersection. It's confusing to people trying to turn and figure out what lane you're in. This is why they fine that activity.
If I had enough space to get into the crosswalk, I'd do so to hopefully nudge the Uber along where I can safely make a lane change on the actual street. If the Uber doesn't get nudged along and there's no other legal way to move... then I'm "stuck in traffic" quite literally.
It's not absolutely necessary to avoid traffic by breaking traffic laws.
In the DC metro area, lots of times traffic is created by exactly the same scenario. I don't feel bad about it; the root cause was the Uber driver or more traffic up ahead combined with the limitations of human response time.
Blocking the crosswalk is also a traffic violation. In the Uber scenario I presented, it's really not a question about if you want to break a law, it's which law would you rather break.
"Except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic..."
Washington State Law. RCW 46.61.570. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.570
Your mileage may vary though depending on your legal jurisdiction, but lawmakers generally do not write 'average' laws to be unreasonable in eyes of the average person.
What is "supposed" to happen in lawmakers eyes, is that traffic grinds to a halt. Pedestrians stop crossing the road at that particular point and thus don't get hit by cars, and either the Uber driver intentionally causing all these hardships moves or gets ticketed.
Unless crossing the road, or moving around traffic is a matter of life or death ... no one is supposed to break the law and everyone is supposed to be temporarily inconvenienced. Just because someone else broke the law doesn't give the next people rights to break the law in order to ease their convenience.
e: http://www.lacantdrive.com/2008/05/30/is-it-legal-to-change-...
It's not a 'silly situation' and it's not just there - that's illegal. You don't change lanes in an intersection.
If you don't care enough to slow down then I don't know why you'd bother evading speed cameras, and if you do care, slowing down is probably a smarter option.
The way Waze works is that it will do everything and anything it can to avoid a busy intersection or a congested street, without regard to whether or not going out of your way will take more time than just slogging through the intersection or the street. Waze will prefer a route that takes an hour but only takes streets that are empty over a route that takes half an hour but involves multiple busy intersections. Google optimizes its routes purely by time: whatever route will get you there the fastest is what it'll go with.
Waze also has a notorious tendency to encourage people to make left turns from the right lane and vice versa. It's illegal and dangerous. These instructions often take the format of "turn right on [six-lane arterial] and then immediately take the next left", even though it's physically impossible to get across the street in time.
Waze also cannot recognize the entrance to my townhouse complex as an entrance. It will always suggest cutting through a neighboring gated community to get to where I live. As a frequent Lyft rider, this means that I cannot ride with any driver who uses Waze if I'm going to or from my home.
I often have to call drivers who pick me up from my house and say "please confirm that you are not using Waze", and if they say they're using Waze, I will immediately cancel. If they're close enough though, I'll just monitor their route, and I'll immediately cancel if they take a route that only Waze will suggest (for example: the entrance to my complex and the neighboring gated community are on separate but perpendicular arterials; if they're driving on the arterial my entrance is on, but they drive past my entrance and then make a left turn on the other arterial, I'll know they're a Waze user, and I will cancel).
Sometimes, when I'm being picked up from work, I'll see a driver starting up Waze, and I'll say "please don't use Waze; it can't get to where I'm going". Sometimes, the driver will let me manually navigate them or on rare occasion even start up Google Maps, but I've also experienced a bunch of drivers who will throw angry temper tantrums because I asked them politely to not use Waze. One driver started screaming her head off at me while punching the steering wheel. I've had to get out of the car and call their trust & safety hotline a couple of times. I'm convinced that these drivers know that Waze will suggest routes that take more time than Google does, and that they are deliberately using Waze to run up the meter and make more money; as such, they get pissed off when a rider won't play along.
If you install the Waze App, you can report map issues as well as police, traffic, etc.
I submitted a map issue at 11pm (Eastern Time) and it was fixed by early the next morning.
If you don't know where you are going or are traveling long distances, Google Maps is better. Waze simply can't handle long distance routes very well and Google Maps is far less likely to send you down some weird road to avoid a hot-spot. You definitely want to try and avoid weird roads or odd routes in strange areas.
Waze traffic avoidance is also far superior.
I tend to need to charge my phone anyway but for short trips sometimes I don't even bother launching AA, which is a shame.
Waze has been pretty good though and it works well in the AA environment, which is purposely limited so you can't get into to much of a distracting flow.
- Start car.
- I can't plug the phone in right away, because it will miss some kind of internal step, I have to wait for Ford Sync to finish "booting", then plug in my phone and stow it the box where my USB plug is.
- Android Auto then launches, unless another app on your phone is prompting you, at which point nothing will happen, you have to dig the phone back out to find out what happened.
- AA launches, click mic button on wheel (it's a hw equivalent of ok google): "Play Metallica." Always launch music first because if I launch nav first and then want to play music, it will switch off the map and show you the music controls, which I only want when I'm not navigating. But if you launch them in the right order you'll get nice music notifications on the map.
- Click mic button on wheel: "Navigate to whereever", unless of course I don't know where I am going, but if I was clever enough to put the address in my gcal it will already show up on my auto's screen, this is my favorite feature of AA. If I don't know where I am going I need to look it up on my phone, so dig it out, and then the AA app fullscreens a splash screen on the phone, so I need to drag down the notification bar, unfullscreen it, use my phone, relaunch AA again (or just unplug the phone and plug it back in) then stow the phone.
- If I put the car in reverse before this the rear backup camera turns on so I can't access the UI at all, so I might have to do steps some of the steps again depending on when I put the car in reverse and if the car was listening.
- Car now moves away from house and kicks over from Wifi to LTE and most of the time this works, but occasionally the music will just stop playing so I have to click on the "play" button again the UI.
If I'm unlucky Ford Sync will notice that something stopped playing so it will automatically put on the next music source, FM radio. Now there's no way for me to get back into Android Auto without unplugging the phone and plugging it back in. Sometimes(?) there's an android auto icon that shows up in Sync that lets me back in but I haven't determined why sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesn't.
It's not a bad system, it's just still 1.0ish; once you're past all this crap and on the road it's really nice to have all my music and maps available, and of course having the google assistant is much nicer than I anticipated, so I can do things like "good morning" via a voice command and it will play my daily summary.
Overall, in a driving commute of about 25 minutes I have to spend the first 2-4 minutes effectively waiting to configure Android Auto and for it to kick in with the proper signal and menus.
It's a hassle for everyday commuting when the purpose of AA is to simplify a lot of the work. The menu systems are also a bit of a pain to navigate for podcasts. So I end up organizing my music/podcasts before I get in the car.
Tip: open the Android Auto app on your phone while you're unplugged, go to the settings menu, and choose the "Limit WiFi" option.
This way it'll just outright disable WiFi when Android Auto is engaged, so you don't have to wait for it to realize you've driven away from your network.
I also have the Wi-Fi problem. I'm not sure why AA doesn't automatically just turn it off when it starts. I've been meaning to create a Tasker profile to do that for me.
Most of the problems I've had have been software bugs. Like this morning when I attempted to send a Hangouts message. The assistant voice made it sound like it worked, but nothing every actually sent.
Anyway, I'm not sure a screenless device is really what you want. Most of the appeal of AA is that it uses your regular phone, so it can use your data, read and send message, make calls, etc.
Disclaimer: Google employee
With regard to the screenless device, I do like having my phone be the centralized device of the entire thing, I just would like to make it a more permanent part of the car so I can just hop in and drive.
I am debating trying a spare SIM and an old device and just leaving it in there plugged all the time, but that just introduces an entirely different set of problems.
I can't say I would ditch my iPhone just because of this (or maybe I would?), but I might get an android phone just to use it with Waze in my car if this really works great...
Apple CarPlay is total useless so far, even to play music from my iPhone in the car, I rather use the built in media app from VW. Apple maps in Europe is a total joke. Many times it tells me I should drive into a one way street or it would try to take me into pedestrian zones...
The most infuriating thing about Waze is when you hit traffic that it already knew about but only then does it add 5-10 minutes in delay time.
LA rush hour is bad enough with crowded enough side streets now that the way to outsmart it in my experience is to be dumber than Google and just take the damn highway after all, with the exception of a few certain areas (like "the highway's moving ok overall but the exit I need will be backed up an extra five minutes so I'm going to got off early" type stuff).
I imagine that's why people use Waze daily.
I'm assuming that Apple isn't playing nice with Google and giving users free choice about which nav apps they can use and that Google would release a Google Maps and/or Waze version for Car Play if given the ability.
Again, these are assumptions, if anybody can correct me on that, I'd love to hear otherwise.
This to me is a big enough deal that I would seriously consider an Android over an iPhone for this reason alone. I never use Apple Maps, it's an inferior product on every level, and I can't understand why Apple seems insistent on the idea that people want to use it. In my experience the only people who use Apple Maps are those who are too lazy to change from the default nav system built into the iPhone or just don't care enough to use a better nav system. It's never people who actively prefer Apple Maps.
And people who use CarPlay, unfortunately.
I rented a car with CarPlay a couple of months ago and I was surprised at how easy it was to just plug my phone in and get going with it.
> No one I know uses it and most never heard of it.
Intersting — everyone uses it in California, to the point that it strongly affects traffic patterns[2]. Where are you?
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dash [2] http://www.gq.com/story/waze-ruining-los-angels-side-streets
It has international appeal as well, the map editing feature has made it a hit in places with less than perfect map data:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/2...
Kind of fun thing for your kids to do on a long drive. That might be why the cartoon like interface.
Like Pokemon Go, the constant network traffic + GUI interaction makes it huge battery drain. I deleted the app from my phone.
Google map's traffic info is very good. I suspect Google paid that much likely because potentially FB, MSFT or Amazon "might" get it and use it is a beach head to enter the Mobile Map App market. If that's the case, it is a very good play on Waze's part to get the high valuation.
There's something seriously wrong with society when both kids and their parents are working together to evade the police, and obviously have no respect for the police. And the problem isn't with the kids or their parents. Average citizens should not see their police as an enemy group generally working against their best interests.