So I’m now the proud owner of a new Volvo XC40 — one of the first cars to have Google’s Android Automotive platform as the basis of the head unit for the car. It does not support Android Auto (which runs on your phone) at all; the whole console is natively Google.
There is a very limited number of Play Store apps currently available for Android Automotive. For music it’s basically Tidal and handful of others. Any chance we might see Plexamp ported to Android Automotive? I can’t imagine it’s a huge developer lift since the car runs Android apps natively. I think it’s more of a certification thing to validate that the app will work within the screen size and DPI requirements.
Hope this can be done — I miss my Plexamp in the car! (Well I’m just playing via Bluetooth now, of course, but I miss it on the head unit as I had with Android Auto.) Thanks!
thanks for the official reply. As you might have guessed, we still haven’t send you a polestar 2.
What is needed in form of userbase and / or financial support to motivate the plexamp team to port the app the the aaos platform? Any chance a crowdfunding could help here?
Totally makes sense. I’m sure we’ll get there, though. Ford and Lincoln are supposed to be standardizing on Android Automotive next year, as is BMW. (Which is especially interesting since BMW was the huge holdout against even offering Android Auto in the past; they were Apple Car Play only.)
The initial release is a bit rough, and only supports playing playlists, but that should be decent enough for now. I’ll consider adding more features slowly, but hopefully Plex will be able to release a far superior app before that.
So awesome to see this! Unfortunately I have a Volvo XC40, so I get the message that it’s “not compatible with my device.” Do we know how Android Automotive identifies whether an app can be installed on a Polestar 2, an XC40, an XC60, etc.? I would assume other than things like DPI, etc., any AA app should work on any AA head unit? Or is that overly naive?
It should work on every Android automotive device, although if it’s saying incompatible, I may have to request specific approval for each manufacturer, documentation isn’t too clear.
You can try installing it remotely via browser or directly from the play store on the car, it is expected that it won’t be compatible with your phone.
I think you may be right that it has to be approved for each possible manufacturer/device. As an example, if I try to install the Vivaldi Web Browser for AA, the Play Store tells me it is not compatible with any of my devices. (My Volvo shows up in the list of my devices, but is grayed out as incompatible, just like my Pixel phone.) So that’s another AA app that appears it can only be installed on Polestar. Same thing happens with your Plex app.
the app has now been fully approved and is available for all Android Automotive devices
I’m currently aware of a couple of issues - on first login you may be bounced back to the sign in screen, which can be resolved by closing/re-opening the app (this seems like an Android 12 issue)
In addition, if you have a more complex setup requiring selection of a specific server or user, the app will currently only attempt a direct connection to the first server found. I’ll address these issues in a future update and will track any further progress on Github (GitHub - joeyberkovitz/plex-aaos)
Definitely appreciate that this exists, have it installed on mine. Sure beats using bluetooth with no album art, and having to mount a phone to be able to see plexamp on mobile.
