Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

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Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899.

It's puzzling to see this push for general computing on devices that need to far outlast the typical release cycle of GC devices. There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car.

If your consumer hardware needs to last for decades, then the core functionality and automation should be provided by sturdy embedded computers that are self-contained and do not require any kind of network access or regular updates, while the general computing functions functions should be provided by the user's own device or a replaceable/upgradable computer with a standardized interface.

I've been using Apple CarPlay on a car that was manufactured in 2016. There are some occasional issues with the infotainment system, but CarPlay works as well as it did nearly 10 years ago. It is much more likely that CarPlay will continue to function just as well whereas proprietary systems made by car manufacturers are going to start showing their age.

> Google Maps will crash your system randomly

They’ve at least got some incentive to keep this working so they can keep showing you ads.

> typical release cycle of GC devices

Now I have a lovely vision of the Android Auto device getting Garbage Collected when nothing depends on it.

Real life GC would be a fun project to see a geek movie of.

> There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car.

Android Auto is not Android on the car, it's a protocol that allows an Android phone to use the car's system as a display, with limited UI integration.

The version in Volvo and Polestar's is actually Android Automotive, which is it's own Android distribution with it's own version of Maps/Spotify etc. Funnily it even has Android Auto functionality too.

Restated: “Android Automotive” != “Android Auto”

Although it didn't use to have Android Auto, which was awful. Because as you alluded to, Android apps are not automatically available on AAOS. As it happens the music app I use is not available on AAOS, so until Volvo added Android Auto support to their cars I could not get a good experience with my music.

Yes, Android Auto has some of the standardized interface features I was talking about, allowing the general computing needs to be fulfilled by a device brought by the user.

This is not what the GP is describing though, he's talking about the experience of a built in infotainment system running Android that can (for the time being) sync with his device.

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