Android Auto Apps Powered by Jetpack

Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager

In January, we enabled the Google Play Store to accept open testing submissions of navigation, parking, and charging apps. It’s great to see many of you developing Android Auto apps and sending us feedback through the issue tracker. Thank you for helping us improve the platform so we deliver better in-car experiences together! Drivers have been sending positive feedback, too, as new apps launch to open testing, like Chargemap.

Chargemap in Android Auto

Today, we’ve reached the next milestone: the Android for Cars App Library is available in Jetpack as androidx.car.app 1.0.0-beta01! The move to Jetpack makes the library open source, gives you more visibility into our feature development, and provides API consistency with other Jetpack libraries. We’ve updated the developer guide and design guidelines to cover androidx.car.app. Test your app with Android Auto 6.1, or later, then you can publish your app to open testing in the Google Play Store. androidx.car.app includes all functionality of the closed source library (com.google.android.libraries.car), and then some! For example, we added a new GridTemplate, which is useful when users rely primarily on images to make their selections.

Examples of the new GridTemplate in androidx.car.app

On September 1, 2021, the closed source Android for Cars App Library (com.google.android.libraries.car.app) will no longer be available and the Google Play Store will not accept submissions that use com.google.android.libraries.car.app. Our development focus from now, including new features, is on androidx.car.app. We encourage you to migrate now and we’ve created a migration guide that makes it easy. Migration usually takes less than a day, in our experience with early access partners.

We’re working hard to stabilize androidx.car.app and prepare the Google Play Store for production submissions. Production submissions will require androidx.car.app and you can get your app ready by using it in open testing today.