Android One: $100 Nexus 5-ish phones for developing markets

Android "L": not ready for release yet, only "developer preview"

- "Material Design": a clever extension of the flat card-based design they've been using all along, plus nearly everything is animated. As a dev, you just assign a z-value to UI elements, and the framework does all the rest (drop shadows, etc.). Also, they've got support for the same look and feel in web app (Polymer). It's all eye candy, but it's very well done eye candy. (Also, there's a new release of the Roboto fontset.)

- New phone unlocking magic. If you're wearing an Android Wear watch and it's in radio range of your phone, then you won't be challenged for an unlock PIN.

- The distinction between native apps vs. web pages are somewhat blurred together now. They all stack together ("Recents"). HTML5 as an alternative to "native" app development? They're not saying it, but they're clearly working in that direction. Notably, with "app indexing", a URL in the browser can point directly into an app that can handle it.

- It's faster, replacing the Dalvik compiler with ART (a new compiler, with claimed 2x performance improvement, that notably supports ARM, MIPS, and x86). Also a new garbage collector, full 64-bit support, better GPU support ("PC gaming graphics in your pocket" on phone hardware coming soon) and better power management (e.g., non-urgent network transmissions can be labels as such and coalesced). One nice thing is a "battery saver" mode, which normally kicks in if you're below some percentage, which will shift all sorts of things around to maximize what you've got left (e.g., it will disable background data).

- Developer preview binary images will be online tomorrow for Nexus 5 and Nexus 7.

Google Play Services: ships every 6 weeks; 93% of users are on the latest version. Developers can thus rely on it being current.

Universal Data Controls: they're giving users some centralized control over privacy leakage (i.e., whether apps can learn your location). This is a big deal. This is clearly a response of some sort to the PrivacyGuard / XPrivacy features that you previously had to root your device to get.

Connected, seamless experiences: everything knows what you're doing, whichever device you're using, and everything's voice enabled. It's the Google Now idea of trying to feed you what you need to know, when you need to know it, and then some.

Android Wear (smart watches): All of the speakers have one on their wrist. They're all too big and ugly (a complaint I also raise with many normal watches these days). Hopefully the guts are smaller and third-party watchmakers will be able to shoehorn them into traditional watch cases. We already knew about using the watch to display notifications. They've now included all the cards from Google Now and they do support "native" watch apps.

- Also, there's a bunch of fitness support (pedometer, connected heartrate monitors) built in. Presumably, you can go running with this watch and a Polar Bluetooth HR strap, and no phone. That's a feature for me.

- Also cool is "Navigation for Mobile", which is "particularly useful when you're walking".

- The wearable portion of an app is automatically installed / maintained when you install the corresponding app on your phone.

- Voice actions, e.g., "Ok Google, remind me to do X when I get home.": lots of neat stuff going on in the background to make that work correctly. To-do items seem to dump into a "Notes" app that looks a lot like Google Keep. "Ok Google, call me a car." That's all it takes to summon a car with Uber or Lyft.

- LG G watch and Samsung Gear Live, available for order today. Moto 360, later this summer. More coming.

Android Auto: This is the thing I've really been waiting for, like literally waiting for this before I replace our ten year old Acura TL. Very simplified UI, so big buttons for the things you care about, not a grid of apps. Everything is voice activated. Demo was in a Kia Soul cockpit, forcibly removed from a Kia... Plug phone in and the phone controls the screen.

- They've done custom automotive front-ends for navigation, phone, music, and text messaging.

- A bunch of third-party audio apps have already been built to support the new APIs (Pandora, iHeart Radio, etc.).

- "Over 40 new partners have joined the automotive alliance". Looking at the screenshot, I see: Acura/Honda, Alfa Romeo/Fiat/Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep, Audi/VW/Skoda/Seat/Bentley, Ford, Chevrolet/Opel (+other GM?), Hyundai/Kia, Suzuki, Subaru, Volvo, Renault/Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Maserati. "First cars will roll off the lot before the end of 2014."

- Notably absent: Tesla, Mercedes, BMW, Toyota/Lexus/Scion, Porsche, Ferrari (odd, given the inclusion of Maserati), Rolls Royce (related somewhat to BMW), Bugatti (related somewhat to VW).

- Also included are a stack of third-party head unit and add-on vendors (Alpine, Clarion, Parrot, JVC/Kenwood)

Android in the Living Room: They're pitching "Android TV" as a unified programming experience to make it easier to program TV sets. Given that Google TV's been around for years, I don't expect much excitement happening here. What's new here is voice input on remote controls, or just the app on your phone (as in Chromecast). You can also use your phone as the remote-control d-pad.

- Notably included: Games. Google's trying to connect Android games onto the TV. Good luck with that.

- Notably missing: any discussion of integration into AV receivers.

Chromecast: unsurprisingly, it's really, really popular. Being cheap is a feature. "YouTube sees more engagement on Chromecast than any other TV streaming product."

- I was hoping that Google would merge Chromecast and GTV in some fashion, but that's not the plan. They still have a "lay back" UX for GTV and the phone-touch UX for Chromecast.

- One curious feature is that they let you connect to a Chromecast even if you're not on the same WiFi network, using some vaguely specified way of determining if you're physically nearby.

- "Backdrop" - you can customized the images being displayed by the "ambient" feed when you're not otherwise watching TV. That now includes personal photos (from any G+ image gallery). (So, finally, Chromecast + any TV = a big digital picture frame.)

- You can mirror any Android device to the TV, kinda like Koush's Allcast. (Curiously, they're deploying the smartphone-side feature behind this through Google Play Services.)

Chromebooks: they're popular.

- They unlock the Chromebook screen when you get nearby with your phone. They've got a bunch of other random bits of integration (e.g., SMS messages).

- Android apps on Chromebook. (Leverage that popular platform again.) Looks like they ported a full Android software stack to run on the Chromebook platform. But, wait, Chrome runs on Android... on Chromebook. My head hurts.

Home/Corporate device sharing

- Underlying data separation

- No modifications to existing apps

- Enterprise management features

- Integrates Samsung Knox into the core Android platform (!!!)

Miscellaneous announcements

- Native MS Office document (PowerPoint, Word, Excel) editing in Android Google Docs apps

- Google Drive: encrypting data at rest (!!), and unlimited storage $10/user/month. Wow.

- Google Cloud Platform: assorted server-side features to encourage you to build on Google's server infrastructure rather than Amazon EC2, and claims that it's cheaper than the competition. The speaker doesn't seem to feel comfortable when an audience member heckles him. Does Google I/O have bouncers around for its keynotes?

I ran out of time with half an hour left in the video. Yeesh.

There's a lot to like from today's announcements, though I'm also skeptical that Android TV will do anything notable, and it's a shame. To do it right, you'd need to have an alliance between one of the bigger TV providers, some content providers, and Google, so that there's one UI for content whether it's on the cable/satellite connection, some streaming service, or local playback.

The lack of anything good that integrates these is still what's keeping me from becoming a cord-cutter, and Aereo's loss at the Supreme Court today tells me it's going to be a bumpy road for anyone who wants to try to take on any of the rent-seekers who are doing nothing but making TV viewing more frustrating and expensive.

Android Auto seems like it could be a real winner, but I'm several years away from a new car purchase, and am skeptical of how well the aftermarket head units will integrate with factory controls/nav/etc.

The watches don't excite me at all, and I wouldn't be able to wear one at work anyway.

Kind of disappointed to not hear anything at all about the next Google phone, but maybe something was said and I just missed it. I know they're re-branding as "Silver" and that we weren't going to get a new device yet, but some idea of what's on the horizon would have been nice. Buying an N5 now seems like just about the worst timing, even though my wife's contract just ended, and I'd like to get her on a prepaid plan to save money. (She'd prefer something with a hard keyboard, but all of the phones that have keyboards are terrible in one way or another.)

I just hope the N4 is powerful enough to run Android L. It's the one phone that doesn't feel slow or outdated at all this far into owning it, so I'd love to get one or two more major OS releases into it.

A couple thoughts on what wasn't announced. (Yet?)

- New features for Google Voice. It's not dead yet, right?

- Android-in-the-car: how well does it support all the different car-specific controls (e.g., music track skip buttons) and with secondary displays (between the gauges, heads-up displays, etc)? Given the similarity in feature set, will the phone-car interface be an actual standard? Also, what happens if you've got two phones in the car that are both paired. Who wins? Can they share? It's easy to imagine how lots of other in-car gadgets might want to get in on the screen-hijacking gravy train.

(And also notable, Tesla doesn't seem to be partnering with either Apple or Google. For an alpha-nerdmobile, it's a remarkable omission.)

- Grand unified task management. Android now lets you set reminders of various sorts. Will that ever integrate with Gmail's "Tasks" extension? What about multi-user shared things ("remind my wife to pick up X on the way home")? I've been playing lately with Trello, which has a remarkable amount of sophistication for shared task management, but of course it's not integrated with your email, your calendar, etc.

- Notifications that want to make noises. Now that notifications can get piped to your watch and/or your car, what should all the apps do that often want to accompany their notifications with noises? Today, each app has its own internal settings for these things. Uggh.

- Android TV vs. Chromecast seems awfully confusing, from a consumer perspective at any rate. Chromecast is certainly much easier to use, and the price is right. I figure Android TV would be perfect for the overly-complicated AV receiver market. It would also be great integrated into Bluray players. (Which aren't dead yet...)

- We see lots of Android-everywhere integration (with your ChromeOS, with your watch, with your car) but notable for its omission was integration with your Mac or Windows desktop or laptop.

Thanks for the excellent summary Dan. I only caught parts of the rather long keynote.

I think it's great Google is shifting Android development to allow developers an early preview of the next OS release. This process has been rather beneficial on the iOS side, as the developers working on the OS and new APIs get bug reports back before it's shipped to the public. For major redesigns, it also helps to get the feedback from the community on what is and isn't working.

The consistent design language across all their products will be good to see as well.

All the additions to the core OS for GPU, power efficiency, and smarter multitasking are good additions too. Bits and pieces of these have worked their way into mobile platforms and also in OS X to improve laptop battery life. The efforts so far seem to pay off well, and I'd expect Android to continue to see similar gains.

Google Play Services continues to bother me a bit from the perspective of locking more and more programs to Google Android only. Tied with the new runtime, developers are going to have to decide if they want to support Google Android, or Amazon Fire Android. It's going to be interesting seeing how this dynamic plays out between the two sides.

On the flip side though, Google Play Services has been an important tool for Google to use to battle the fragmentation issue. Hearing the success numbers of keeping end users up to date is great to see.

The new voice actions will probably see some good use. The reminders ability in particular is why I upgraded to the iPhone 4s when it came out. Still a feature I make use of multiple times a week.

The watches are interesting to see, and a step above the Pebble. If I was an Android user, they would be tempting. I liked the possibilities of the Pebble, but the implementation was a little rough to sustain my interest in continuing to wear one. Deeper OS level integration seems a key component to ensure success here and avoid some of the frustrations these watches can bring.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I still have no idea what that means...


I'm very excited for this. When I had my phone rooted, I was able to set up Tasker so that my phone would have NO lock screen when I was at home on my own WiFi network, but have a PIN code to unlock when I left my house. I like the idea of having the watch be your credentials.



I'm mixed about this. It seems like every time I open a web link in the Chrome browser, I see 9 tabs I forgot were even open, usually from various home screen and "OK Google" searches. Now all those useless tabs are going to end up in my recent list? Oh well, at least that will get me to close them


All good stuff. Though I'd like to hear an explanation of how developers will see all these speed advantages from ART without needing to do anything, when you can enable ART right now and from what I hear you don't really get much improvement. Did I hear that wrong? Do developers have to take advantage of ART in some way?


A great addition. Isn't there an Android phone out there now that has this stuff? I think there was even one that turned everything black and white at a certain battery level...


I do worry about the size of these things, but I don't think we've seen them quite enough yet. They certainly looked gigantic on the wrists of the women who spoke on stage. Sundar's Moto 360 even looked too big, and that's the one that everyone's waiting for. The LG and Samsung models have much too large bezels, which I think adds to how big they look. I would wager that if the whole product were still the same size, but the screen somehow went all the way to the edges, like it looks the Moto 360 will, your mind might trick you into thinking it looks smaller. I think at some point you can't make it too small or its utility diminishes.

Either way, I'm very excited. I haven't worn a watch in over 15 years, but this might get me to wear one.


Perhaps I haven't spent enough time with Google Now, but I have a very love/hate relationship with it.

...I decided to spin off my Google Now rant into another thread...


I've heard the heartrate monitors on these things don't work well in certain conditions...like moving. I will say that it was very unclear how well any of these Wear devices would work without a phone. I had the impression that a phone was essential, but it would be great if they could work with other bluetooth devices.

I'm also still not sold on wristband pedometers. That method just doesn't seem as accurate to me as something strapped to your core.


VERY excited for that stuff. It's cool to see this extending the contextual search stuff they showed off last year.


Again, I wonder how many watches LG or Samsung are going to sell with that Moto 360 on the horizon. The LG watch just looks clunky, though it has clean lines. The Samsung watch is made by Samsung, which is enough reason for me to avoid it.


Oh my god I want this so badly. I drive all over northern Virginia as part of my job, and the process of putting addresses into my car's navigation system is mind-numbing. Nevermind the fact that the maps DVD is now 10 years old and doesn't contain major changes made to this extremely busy traffic area, I just hate my navigation system's interface. If I could just get into the car and have it know what's next on my calendar and let me just accept the next destination, then see real time traffic conditions on the road so I can choose alternate routes? Oh my god, I'm so ready for this.

The only thing that makes me wary is that I don't like the idea of proprietary systems like this in a car. I don't even want a smart TV (this applies to Android TV) because I don't want to use something that's going to be obsolete in two years, when the thing I paid way more for is going to stick around for another 8 years. I've had my TV for 8 years and my car for 5. I've replaced my TV set top box about 4-5 times in that period, and I would have loved to replace my navigation system by now. Plus, what if you get a new phone and decide to switch to another platform? I wouldn't want to be an Android user using Apple's car system and vice versa. I don't know if there's a solution for this, but we need to figure it out.


I'm starting to wonder if it's rdio's fault that they're never invited to the party. It seems like in the last few weeks there have been a half dozen announcements involving streaming audio services, and none of them ever mention rdio. I really worry for their future, because I love the service so much.


Could that be their way of entering into the car companies they didn't partner with? Doesn't Alpine make the stereos for the car industry?


This still doesn't bother me because I almost never switch inputs, but what surprised me was the near-absence of talk about set top boxes. They only talked about TVs with Android TV built into them, then at the very end they quickly mentioned that Razr (really?) and Asus. I assume these will be HDMI pass-through boxes, but they didn't talk about it at all.


This is a big deal. It's something that's bothered me for a long time. I have a guest network to separate visitors from my own computers/printers, so this is a big deal. Very smart.


True, though I can't imagine having a TV in my home that's on all day (seems wasteful). At best, I see it as a pleasant way to customize the weird images that show up when I switch to the Chromecast input on my receiver


This was one of the times during the keynote that made me want to yell out "When? How?" Does anyone know if this is possible now? If not, when? Is it an L feature? Do I have to upgrade my Chromecast? It really ticked me off not knowing anything more about this. They just kept saying "You can do this!" and I kept saying "HOW?"



Love it, just like with the watch.


ChromeOS doesn't run on Android, does it? And aren't most ChromeOS devices Intel-based? Meaning whatever they're doing it must be some sort of emulation, right?

In the end, I wasn't very excited about this and I really don't see it going anywhere. It's hard enough to get developers to code for Android, they're not going to throw in a little extra work for some minor ChromeOS interplay. I don't see the big deal. It's not like we'll be able to install any app we want. It was pretty clear that these were select apps.


Oh snap! I loved this.


There are limitations on that, though. I think you have to have at least five people signed up to get that price, and it doesn't count for any of their other services, does it? I guess it doesn't matter, though. If I could just drop all my files in Drive, that would be pretty huge. Regardless, they still have some of the best cloud storage prices.


Apparently there was tons of security...and they all stood around. From what I heard they were very gentle in escorting the protestors from the building. I thought one of them was a kook, and the other had a very legit, specific complaint.

Android One was the only phone-related topic. But that's not surprising, correct me if I'm wrong, but they never announce a new phone at I/O. Last year the only announcement was the Play versions of the One and the S4. The new Nexus phones are always announced in the fall with not a word about them before that.


Well, that's a rumor. I don't think anything's set in stone yet. Like you said, we didn't get any information on their phone strategy.

I also don't think it's incredibly foolish to buy a Nexus 5 now. It's still a fantastic, extremely capable phone. It's going to be running the latest version of Android until fall of 2015 at the latest. My Nexus 5 has held its performance quality longer than any Android phone I've had before it. I've seen no noticeable slowdown from the day I first got it, and I couldn't say that about any other phone I've had.


I'll be curious if it gets L too. The Galaxy Nexus didn't get KitKat, but there could have been other issues there. I liked my Nexus 4, but I feel far more confident about my N5's ability to hold its performance for another year.

I don't expect any "new features" for Google Voice. Unless you count "being swallowed by Hangouts" a feature I'm a little worried about all that. I'm not the biggest fan of Hangouts, which is a little hard to use.


Lots of people are saying this, but I don't really get the confusion. Chromecast is a cheap device that lets you send stuff from your mobile device to the TV. Android TV is a device in your home theater that brings you content (Android TV just happens to also be a Chromecast).

I guess it's just me, but I actually find the Chromecast to be fare more cumbersome to use than my Google TV is. I'm able to bring up content to view much faster on my Google TV than looking it up on my phone and sending it to my Chromecast. More importantly, controlling content on the Chromecast is awful. I rented a movie through Google Play a couple weeks ago, and my remote control capabilities consisted of a single button: pause. Even if I had more control, I don't want it on my phone. I hate using a touch screen to watch TV (we've chatted about this before), so I look forward to trying out Android TV's remote.

In the end, I see Android TV on the home's main home theater, and a Chromecast on all the other TVs in the house.

AndroidTV / Chromecast: At this point, count me unsatisfied by Google's living room story. They're taking a very un-Googly throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach.

Chromebooks + Android integration: Chromebooks run with both x86 and ARM CPUs, as do Android phones. Apps are distributed in Dalvik bytecode and (depending on Dalvik vs. ART) compiled when installed or run through a JIT or whatnot. It *is* possible to have native methods, compiled for a specific platform, included in your APK. I suppose there must be a "fat binary" equivalent for Android that lets you ship native x86 and ARM code, side by side.

Material Design: this is a combination of UI widgets plus "design language" (i.e., here's how to make a good looking Android app; use these sized fonts, this sort of line spacing, this way of emphasizing something, that way of stirring in colors, etc.).



Looking back at it, there are a couple large themes that shine through.

- Customized, context aware content. Google knows you and they'll make sure you see something appropriate. (Google Now on steroids...)

- Your stuff, on whatever device. Desktop? Check. Phone? Check. Watch? Check. Car? Check.TV? Umm, yeah. Also: you win if you buy into the whole ecosystem, and you get a partial win if you partially buy in. Like, an iPhone will play along for somethings, but an Android phone is better.

- As a developer, if you play nicely (e.g., leveraging the notiification APIs properly) then your stuff magically works on the watch and in the car without you having to do anything.



I'm really impressed with what Google's doing. They're pushing hard and moving fast, but there's clearly a big vision guiding all of this, and there's presumably even more to the vision than what we're seeing.

Oh, and I wrote a fun rant about this for The Truth About Cars. http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/06...-bodily-fluids/

But that's what I don't understand. You see it as much messier than I do. I see Android TV as being a Chromecast that doesn't require a phone or tablet. That is absolutely not without thought.

In the end, they're both Chromecasts, so I don't really see what's so bizarre about their approach.

At the moment, I'm pretty excited by the announcement that "OK Google" is going to work across the entire phone, not just in Now or the home screen. The update is getting pushed out over the next week (I don't have it yet, grr).

"OK Google" will also work on the lock screen. When the phone is plugged in, it'll even work when the screen is turned off! I assume this is because unlike the Moto X, most phones don't have that dedicated chip in them, so battery life would be an issue if the Nexus 5 were always listening even when unplugged.

Nice article! Very funny

Here's the question: I'm sitting on my couch. I want to watch a movie. What should I do:
- Look at my Android Wear watch, click something, and say "Ok Google, play Groundhog Day on my TV". It's then casted to my Chromecast (or Android TV in "cast" mode).
- Pull out my phone, run Play Movies, search for the movie, then hit the play button, casting it.
- Pull out my d-pad remote control, and use the "lay back" interface to scroll through different movies and/or talk to it to say "play Groundhog Day"?

The genius of the Chromecast is that it gets rid of awful remote control d-pad interfaces and gives you something more powerful (your phone). So far as I can tell, the only place where Android TV is superior is when it's a game platform or when it's acting as a media selector (TiVo vs. whatever else).

Give me an Android TV box that has two external inputs (Bluray + TiVo) and now I can truly banish my receiver's surprisingly poor HDMI-CEC implementation and do it all through the Android TV.

I know we've discussed this before, but I still think that remote controls with buttons are a superior way of controlling the home theater. At least that's how I feel, and I'm sure there are others who feel the same way. My point is that everyone is different, and not everyone wants to use their phone as the only method of watching something on their TV. We might be heading that direction, but there are still plenty of people who want to have everything they need in their home theater in order to watch something.

I don't think there's a one size fits all solution here.

Agreed.

I love the Chromecast and any other option that gets me playing computer files or internet streams on the TV set. They're all great. But my instinct when I suddenly want to pause the movie is still to mash the pause button on my infrared universal remote.

Just last night, in fact, our housemate Fishy was chromecasting a Netflix episode of TNG from his phone. A knock came at the door and he scrambled to pause it so someone could get up and answer the door. Now, he's a big supporter of all things Chromecast and has touted the advantages of using a better interface other than IR remote D-pads to find your content. So he loves the Chromecast and prefers to use it for playing Netflix movies, even though the PS3 with its infrared remote adapter works fine for that purpose. Yet he STILL DOVE FOR THE PAUSE BUTTON ON THE INFRARED REMOTE. And after a bit of cursing, retrieved his phone from his pocket, took two tries to wake it up and unlock it, and finally was able to pause the video. (Later, when he tried to unpause it, he accidentally rewound the movie a couple of minutes rather than simply unpausing it.)

So touchscreen phones are still a terrible way to quickly control TV set content.

Here's what I want to know: Has anyone used the Chromecast API to make an infrared remote control adapter for the Chromecast? Googling the Google says no, so far. Is this a market segment we should be researching so we can patent and build something?

Is there a technical reason that no one has yet made a Chromecast IR puck?

I'm envisioning a network-connected device of some kind. Perhaps prototype it via an arduino with an ethernet+wifi port and and IR sensor velcro'd to it. You write software into the Arduino which can talk to the Chromecast across the network. You configure it for your network and your particular Chromecast. Program it so that it responds to IR remote signals. Then set it on the mantle with your TV, and now play/pause FF/Rew Prev/Next on your IR remote now succeed for the Chromecast.

Projects like this one seem to indicate that generic-level network playback control of a Chromecast is possible. In other words, I don't have to be inside the Netflix app to be able to play and pause Netflix playback on the Chromecast.

Of course everyone would argue that what I should be doing is tossing out the Chromecast and getting some other kind of playback device which already includes IR support. That's a valid point, but there are a lot of people with Chromecasts, and this seems like an unfilled market segment. I am surprised that no one has done this yet. So much so that it makes me suspect that there's a reason no one has done this yet. Anyone know?

At this point I think the added cost and the complexity would bring it to the point where you might as well just get an Android TV box.

Does anyone know what the delivery date for the added Chromecast features is? They kept talking about all these things the Chromecast can do, but never talked about when the features would be implemented. And it's not like they're waiting for developers to catch up. The screen mirroring and guest access features are all Google stuff, but there wasn't a word about when they plan to put these in place.

I got the overall sense that the presentations were very much a work in progress. For example, I watched the in-depth Android Auto presentation, and they went into loads of detail on how to integrate with the music player, but nothing whatsoever on how you might do a full-screen app (say, a competing nav system). I got similar sentiment from watching other presentations, where the uniform message was "here's all the cool and awesome stuff that we're doing. APIs aren't final. We're still working on it. Come on in and let us know how it works for you."

With respect to the questions about IR remotes and whatnot, there's clearly a broader universe in which they're hoping to put contextually relevant controls (e.g., Tony's roommate's desired pause button) everywhere you might want them. On your watch. On your phone. On the Android TV d-pad remote. Etc. Given that Google TV boxes also know how to be IR Blasters for TiVos and such, there's clearly an attempt in the Android codebase to have all-singing-all-dancing-all-routing-to-the-right-destination remote control support. This suggests that an IR receiver connected to something akin to an Arduino board could probably do what you want. Or, who knows, maybe HDMI-CEC is part of the Android all-singing-all-dancing future.

Meanwhile, back to the Android Auto stuff, they went on about how they've dealt with tons of legal bureaucracy in order to make sure that everybody's music player meets appropriate requirements (e.g., the ability to operate the system while wearing glasses that black out your vision and give you a limited 1.5 second window in which to execute a task before going black again).

So long as your music app is built with their APIs (wherein you're basically just skinning the official app), you're good to go. Beyond that, hello insane regulations. Curiouser and curiouser.

Interesting stuff about the Android Auto, Dan. Please keep us updated if you find more interesting tidbits.


Sure they're trying to do that, but I don't think I want it. It's still more complicated and prone to fail. I know I sound old here, but what doesn't fail is a pause button on a physical keypad.

A quick anecdote: I love how I get media controls on the lock screen. but they disappear! Seriously, I don't know what the problem is, but for some reason my phone has this obnoxious habit of forgetting that there's a media activity currently running, and at least half the time I'm playing a podcast, song, or Chromecast video I'll wake my phone up and see the plain old lock screen. I then have to unlock the phone, bring the app back up, and perform the desired control.

I know this is probably just my phone, but it's a good example of why I want something reliable.

There's an API, with implementations in library form, for Android, iOS, etc. I don't believe that the underlying network protocol has been opened (or reversed) yet. Having an IR sensor running Android might be considered to be overkill.

Tony, it might just be that we're in the minority. I've wondered for years why there aren't any good bluetooth AVRCP remote controls. I'd love to have one for my car so I could control my podcast playback on my phone without looking at the screen. I have a bluetooth receiver with control buttons on it, but that doesn't even work half the time (perhaps there's just something wrong with my phone).

Porsche has hinted why they are not supporting Android Auto:

The erosion of privacy is really bothersome. I still can't believe people voluntarily use that dongle from Progressive just to save a few dollars.

Curious. I can see where some facts about the car would be really helpful for the nav system (e.g., velocity, steering angle -- allowing for dead reckoning when GPS is unreachable). As to the rest, it sounds like a data dump like that would enable third-party data recorders, which might be all kinds of useful to the tuner community.

Anyway, I refuse to believe that Porsche, which is part of VW and therefore has a remarkable amount of negotiating leverage with Google, wouldn't be able to reach an accommodation. Heck, VW cars are now shipping with Android Auto. So... I'm going to have to call B.S. on this privacy issue. There's something else going on here.

Related: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/10/06/...uto-is-running/

TechCrunch has Google's official statement denying collecting "throttle position, oil temp and coolant temp". TechCrunch then makes a new claim that Google had in the past asked for more data then they do currently for implementing Android Auto.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/google-...utomotive-data/