You must log in or register to comment.
What’s getting yanked is that older phones won’t connect to Android Auto enabled vehicles if the phone is running Android Nougat. It must be Running Android Oreo or later.
For those not remembering, Nougat was released in 2016 and went out of support in 2019. By the most recent metric (Dec. 2022) about 4% of all Android devices currently run Nougat. So this will affect all fifteen of the people still running this OS.
Most devices that were originally sold with Nougat have an upgrade path to Oreo. The bigger problem is folks who purchased devices with Marshmallow (orig. 2015) or Lollipop (orig. 2014) who stopped receiving upgrades past Nougat. These are the devices that will most likely be impacted by this change.
Personally, I like to keep my devices for at least five years, so them deprecating 2016 and earlier is okay with me.
On the one hand: I don’t see a reason for Google to keep supporting old versions.
On the other hand: pushing an update to an old device and sabotaging it by showing an “install updates” popup (as if that’s even possible for devices still running Android 7, that’s bullshit) is just dickish.
The old version of Android Auto works perfectly fine. Show a popup once if you want (“your device will no longer receive Android Auto updates, third party apps may stop working”) but don’t actually disable anything that’s working perfectly fine.
Google pulled that shit before. I would understand if they had a customer support department that’d get flooded when newer hardware stopped working, but all Google has is a forum that no Google employees ever pay any attention to.
The issue is they probably want to change serverside stuff without caring about the old stuff and the alternative to the update and it’s prompt is that it will simply crash, show errors, hang or whatever…
I don’t really see what server side stuff an app on the dashboard of a car would need. Their Google Maps API works all the way back to the one installed with Android 2, and failing that users can install a number of navigation apps. Same with their music app (they already killed Play Music anyway).
The only thing I can think of is that they’d be killing Google Assistant on old phones, but that wouldn’t mean the rest of Android Auto couldn’t still work.
No idea but I don’t see why would bother with that if it isn’t because it breaks in nasty ways (maybe with possible legal consequences?).
We need to get to a point where smartphone work for more than 5 years. Hardware wise the battery is the only part that is guaranteed to need to be replaced.
Now whether they do it by stopping the race on Android version or supporting every device is up to them.
Desktop OS (Windows or Linux) support any version as long as the PC is powerful enough. Why on phone we’re limited not by the capabilities of the CPU but its release date?
What’s this is version numbers? I don’t know if this whimsical naming thing works for other brains but between android, debian, R, etc, etc, it no longer registers for me…
Damn, android os versions sound so tasty.
All 120 million, actually.
How many of them have a compatible car, and are using it?
Why hasn’t someone made an open-source implementation of the Android Auto client?
We already have open-source implementations of the AA head unit, and we have the AAwireless project.
I’d be kinda cool to run Android Auto on a Linux phone.
be the change you want to see in the world
I kinda want to tbh, seems like an interesting project, but the whole thing seems really complicated and I might hit a road block with client certification.
A forced nag screen “please buy a new phone to continue” seems shitty, can’t they just stop targeting that specific android version instead of bricking the functionality with an automatic update?
I don’t see the issue of using an older version of Android auto on an older phone, just stop getting new features…
