We already have a new public version of Android Auto, and we review its new features and how to download it.
A week after its beta version, Google has released the final version of Android Auto 11.1, and now we can all download it. This is the app for the car that you download to your mobile, and then connect it to the car console to use the operating system in it.
And as we do in Globe Live Media Basics with each new version of this operating system, we will review the few new features included, explain why there are not more of them, and also tell you how to update your mobile to the latest version.
As we saw in its beta version, the only novelty offered by this new version of Android Auto is to add a small icon superimposed on the icon of the GameSnacks and Customize apps. It is a small drawing of a car that appears inside its icon.
This drawing or icon overlay is the one that Google seems to have launched to indicate which apps work only with the car stopped. Let’s say, they are apps that you can not use while driving for safety, and now you can know which of them are. Hopefully this is just a preview for an icon that will be displayed in many other apps that are only used with the car parked.
The rest of what is included in this release are just fixes to some of the issues that have been reported by users. There are no more external options, such as the already announced support for Zoom, redesign of the settings with Material You or change the app that opens at startup. The latter are options that are slowly coming to some users, but are not released across the board.
And why is it that there never seem to be big news? Because Google’s priority is to fix bugs and internal errors. The company does not usually specify which bugs have been fixed, so we can’t know the specific solutions either.
Keep in mind that this is an operating system that runs in the car while driving, so any error can be fatal for the user. This means that Android Auto updates cannot simply release a new feature and then keep improving it, as they cannot afford widespread bugs.
The version we have of Android Auto 10.8 is the stable one, which means that anyone can update in a simple way. You can do it directly through Google Play, looking for updates of the apps installed on your mobile, among which Android Auto will appear.
You can also download the update manually by downloading its APK from APKMirror. The only decision you have to make is to choose the architecture of your mobile and whether it is ARM or ARM64, and download the latest version available. If your mobile is current, it is almost certainly the ARM64. Once downloaded, you just have to install the APK file on Android.