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Comment by hulitu | Hacker News Reader

Android auto, if you do not use google apps or music players, is useless. It only allows google apps and some music players to display on your car's screen.

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That's not true, I've used both Whatsapp and Telegram via Android Auto before. Besides navigation/media/communication, what kind of applications do you think would be useful to have with Android Auto anyways?

By the way, here you have a list of applications that supports Android Auto, what's missing really? https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/promotion_3001...

Android Auto now allows OsmAnd to display on your car's screen, so no need for Google apps :-)

Well afaik Android Auto won't work at all without gapps (Play services)

Correct. Android Auto – itself - requires Play Services. Regardless, support for Android Auto gets OSM a brand new market. If they support CarPlay (and MirrorLink, if that’s still being put into cars), better still.

The article is literally about OsmAnd maps showing on car screen on Android Auto. It's in the title. C'mon.

I think this has been true for a long time, but is no longer true. There's actually now multiple navigation apps for Android Auto that are not from Google.

I don't personally use Android Auto at the moment, but I felt pretty similarly about Apple Carplay as well, though the ecosystem for it has improved as well. The one thing I really like about Apple Carplay more than Android Auto (at least last time I used Android Auto) was that Android Auto could only control audio apps that were supported by Android Auto, whereas Apple Carplay can control anything that has iOS player controls on the lockscreen. I really wish Android Auto would support that in some way, just for convenience.

Some additional things may work if you go to developer options from the android auto hamburger menu and enable "unknown sources". This is especially relevant if you install things from f-droid.

I am surprised they don't keep a link to the download on f-droid, it seems to be there, and provided by them.

They tolerate the resource usage that f-droid generates, they aren't working on keeping it up to date there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OsmAnd/comments/bsvkc3/is_osmand_fr...

very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Thanks for this advice! There are several apps I use from f-droid (osmand, Voice audiobook player, antennapod) that could potentially benefit here. I've had to switch to the play store version of the ones I care about.

That would be contradicted by the title of this article.

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