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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could just mirror my phone screen on my car screen.

That's all I need, my phone apps and interface update just fine and are pretty good at doing the things I want.

That is essentially what Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are. The phone generates a secondary screen with a simplified UI and projects that to the car. The car displays it as a video and returns touch events to the phone.

"Simplified UI"? I think you mean the confusing UI that isn't the one I learned before I was trying to switch lanes on the freeway.

Some day, I hope a lawyer will team up with a UI researcher, and then sue car manufactures for "safety theater" features like this that endanger people.

One of my favorites? The click through legal disclaimer that blocks my view of the backup camera screen every single time I pull out of a spot in a parking lot.

A runner up is "we can't let the passenger type a destination into the navigation system because the vehicle is moving"

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details of that "essentially" and "simplified UI". CarPlay seems magic (though admittedly I don't own an iPhone), but Android Auto has been riddled with problems around whether the deck or the phone has control, weird memory leaks, and critical controls or settings missing from the "simplification". Every time I've used it as a passenger, I find myself unplugging the phone, fiddling with the Maps or music UI on there, and then plugging it back in (often only to find out that the pairing got reset somehow and the car needs to be put in park before I can complete the onboarding again).

I had a rental with Apple CarPlay, it worked well but I still got the impression that the system in the car played a big part... it was an interface but I'm not sure it wad driven by my phone. That of course means it could be at the whim of some silly car infotainment type setup. At least that's the impression I got.

It's 100% driven by your phone, what you're seeing is just a video stream from the phone. The infotainment system essentially acts as a dumb terminal. The phone feeds it video, and it feeds the phone X,Y touch coordinates. It also feeds the phone some data about the car, but there is no way for the car to directly modify the interface since it's literally just a video stream.

TY, I didn't know that. Thank you.

But some of the car companies are trying to charge a subscription for it anyway if I recall correctly?

Some car companies are trying to charge a subscription fee for heated seats, too. They obviously control whether it's enabled or disabled, but my point was that when you're using it the car doesn't control the interface.

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