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Comment by idkwhoiam | Hacker News Reader

What a steaming pile of digested waste material. Have they ever thought about fixing their app? There are plenty of Android Auto apps on the store.

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The existence of other Android Auto apps mean nothing. Enel is quite a large company and I am sure it has a lot of people working on its mobile applications. Besides, they are enforcing European law.

Just because they are big in one particular sector doesn't mean that the app they built didn't have problems (security in this case). This is very likely just a way to squeeze some money from a foreign company.

Security was never a concern for google. There is a lot of malware in Google play. But the interference with their monopoly is a concern for them.

It's half true, there are plenty of android auto apps on the store. The majority of them are music playing apps. Navigation apps are not allowed by google. I have 2 cars with android auto and android auto is useless for me because i cannot mirror the phone screen.

> Navigation apps are not allowed by google.

They removed that restriction last April[1], now devs can publish nav, parking, charger apps etc. Sygic[2] as an example.

[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/04/start-your...

[2] https://www.sygic.com/android-auto

The antitrust investigation in this case was launched in May 2019 though.

According to this TomTom, MapFactor and other navigations apps work:

https://9to5google.com/2020/08/11/android-auto-navigation-ap...

Wait what? Only Google Maps is allowed? That is absurd.

Apparently that used to be true but is no longer. OsmAnd (OpenStreetMap navigation app) is releasing their Android Auto app later this year: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/3391

Waze is definitely allowed (but then again, that’s Google too :) )

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