Tag Archives: Auto

The Android Show: I/O Edition – what Android devs need to know!

Posted by Matthew McCullough – Vice President, Product Management, Android Developer

We just dropped an I/O Edition of The Android Show, where we unpacked exciting new experiences coming to the Android ecosystem: a fresh and dynamic look and feel, smarts across your devices, and enhanced safety and security features. Join Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem, and the Android team to learn about exciting new development in the episode below, and read about all of the updates for users.

Tune into Google I/O next week – including the Developer Keynote as well as the full Android track of sessions – where we’re covering these topics in more detail and how you can get started.


Start building with Material 3 Expressive

The world of UX design is constantly evolving, and you deserve the tools to create truly engaging and impactful experiences. That’s why Material Design’s latest evolution, Material 3 Expressive, provides new ways to make your product more engaging, easy to use, and desirable. Learn more, and try out the new Material 3 Expressive: an expansion pack designed to enhance your app’s appeal by harnessing emotional UX, making it more engaging, intuitive, and desirable for users. It comes with new components, motion-physics system, type styles, colors, shapes and more.

Material 3 Expressive will be coming to Android 16 later this year; check out the Google I/O talk next week where we’ll dive into this in more detail.

A fluid design built for your watch's round display

Wear OS 6, arriving later this year, brings Material 3 Expressive design to Google’s smartwatch platform. New design language puts the round watch display at the heart of the experience, and is embraced in every single component and motion of the System, from buttons to notifications. You'll be able to try new visual design and upgrade existing app experiences to a new level. Next week, tune in to the What’s New in Android session to learn more.

Plus some goodies in Android 16...

We also unpacked some of the latest features coming to users in Android 16, which we’ve been previewing with you for the last few months. If you haven’t already, you can try out the latest Beta of Android 16.

A few new features that Android 16 adds which developers should pay attention to are Live updates, professional media and camera features, desktop windowing for tablets, major accessibility enhancements and much more:

Watch the What’s New in Android session and the Live updates talk to learn more.

Tune in next week to Google I/O

This was just a preview of some Android-related news, so remember to tune in next week to Google I/O, where we’ll be diving into a range of Android developer topics in a lot more detail. You can check out What’s New in Android and the full Android track of sessions to start planning your time.

We can’t wait to see you next week, whether you’re joining in person or virtually from anywhere around the world!

Improve media and messaging app integrations with Android Auto

Posted by John Posavatz, Product Manager, Android Auto

At Google I/O this past May, we provided a sneak preview of several new media and messaging features for Android Auto. We are happy to announce that these features are now ready in our latest version of Android Auto, and we encourage you to update your Android Auto implementations to take advantage of them!

New Media Features

Several new features make it easier for users to find the media content that they're looking for. Check out the full documentation for them on our Android developer site.

Search results

After performing an Assistant-based search (e.g. "OK Google, play [artist / album / playlist / book / song / genre]"), music auto-plays as before, and in addition you can now provide your own list of categorized results. First, you'll need to declare support for onSearch() in your MediaBrowserServiceCompat implementation, and then override it. Android Auto forwards a user's search terms to this method whenever a user invokes the "Show more results" affordance.

Android Auto calls onSearch with the same Bundle of extras as the one defined for Android Auto's playFromSearch() calls. Unlike playFromSearch(), onSearch() includes a Result> that can be used to return multiple MediaItems back to Android Auto for display.

You can then categorize search results using title items. For example, music apps may include categories such as "Artists", "Albums" and "Songs".

Improved browse

Content has been "brought forward" out of the drawer, and now resides within the main view of the media screen. Within this new layout, you now have an option of either displaying your browse trees as a simple list, or you can optionally display large grids of album art / icons. We recommend using lists wherever the text description is most useful in describing content (e.g. a list of track names or podcast episodes), whereas the larger grid view is most appropriate where the album / icon aids in quick identification and selection.

To start applying content styles, you should set a global default for how your media items are displayed by applying specific constants in the BrowserRoot extras bundle returned by the onGetRoot() function. Android Auto reads the extras associated with each item in the browse tree and looks for specific constants (detailed in our documentation), and then use the presence/value of each key to add the appropriate indicator.

In order to change the default behavior for a specific node, the Content Style API supports overriding the default global hint for any browsable node's children. The same extras as above can be supplied as extras in the MediaDescription. If these extras are present, then the children of that browsable node will have the new Content Style hint.

Finally, you can organize content using title items to group media in a list. To do this, every media item in the group needs to declare an extra in their media description with the same string value, which you can localize. This value is used as the group title. You also need to pass the media items together and in the order you want them displayed.

Additional metadata icons

In both browsing and playback views, you are now able to show icons next to media items which have explicit language, have been downloaded to the user's device, and which are unplayed / partially played / completed (e.g. for audiobooks and podcasts).

Android Auto inspects extras for each item in the browse tree and looks for the specific keys for the indicators, and then uses the presence/value of each key to add the appropriate indicator.

You should add these extras to content returned by your MediaBrowse Service. "Explicit" and "Downloaded" are boolean extras (set to true to show the indicator), while "Completion State" is an integer extra set to the appropriate value. Apps should create an extras bundle that includes one or more of these keys and pass that to MediaDescription.Builder.setExtras().

Updates to Messaging

We are deprecating CarExtender, in favor of the more robust and broadly beneficial MessagingStyle API. Migrating to MessagingStyle is very straightforward, and not only extends messaging support beyond Android Auto (for example, to Google Assistant), but it also brings the following immediate benefits for Android Auto:

Group messaging

Formerly, Android Auto's support for group messages was lacking - in most cases, notifications were never shown. MessagingStyle addresses that, so that your users never miss a message.

MMS / RCS support

Android Auto only supports SMS natively through the system SMS broadcast. MessagingStyle allows support for SMS apps that themselves support RCS and MMS.

To enable your app to provide messaging service for Auto devices, your app must do the following:

  1. Build and send NotificationCompat.MessagingStyle objects that contain reply and mark-as-read Action objects.
  2. Handle replying and marking a conversation as read with a Service.
  3. Configure your manifest to indicate the app supports Android Auto.

By moving to MessagingStyle, your app will not only gain automotive support, but also gain a richer mobile notification experience including inline replying, image preview, and conversation history; all within the notification shade.

An in-depth guide to implementing (or updating to) MessagingStyle can be found in our online developer documentation.

Thanks for continuing to support Android Auto!