Accessing car hardware APIs in your app for cars

Posted by Madan Ankapura, Product Manager

Building on our effort to enable developers to create app experiences across navigation, parking, and charging apps via Android for Cars App Library as part of Jetpack, today we’re announcing the availability of CarHardwareManager APIs as part of version 1.1 alpha02 to get developer feedback.

CarHardwareManager can be used to query the vehicle’s hardware data, such as model and make, fuel levels and other sensors. Currently, this feature is only available for Android Auto 6.7+ in the open-testing channel. Testing this in a desktop environment requires a new version of the Desktop Head Unit which will be released separately. Stay tuned here for details on when the new version becomes available.

For the entire list of changes in alpha02, please see the release notes. To start building your app for the car, check out our updated developer documentation, car quality guidelines and design guidelines. These library features are available for testing only with the Desktop Head Unit. We will announce when these features are available to run in cars in the future.

In addition, if you are a developer of a parking app, you can now integrate with Google Assistant to enable users to talk to Google to open their favorite parking app and find parking while driving.

If you’re interested in joining our Early Access Program in the future, please fill out this interest form. You can get started with the Android for Cars App Library today, by visiting g.co/androidforcars.