Google Android catch-all

Just tried Android Auto on my S23 and I had to disconnect and reconnect once I think to get through some setup stuff but then it worked fine.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Just tried Android Auto on my S23 and I had to disconnect and reconnect once I think to get through some setup stuff but then it worked fine.

Wired or wireless?

Thanks for the update. I waited long enough for the gray color to sell out, and the green to be delayed until 3/10 for me. So it will be a minute before I get mine.

Since the Android Auto update hit my phone with the new UI, I've had a handful of situations where my phone screen will look active while connected, but be dimmed a bit and non-responsive. If I hit the power button, it brightens up and becomes active again.

This was wired. I really dig the green as well.

Edit: also, the fingerprint scanner is soooooooo much better compared with the s20.

MannishBoy wrote:

Since the Android Auto update hit my phone with the new UI, I've had a handful of situations where my phone screen will look active while connected, but be dimmed a bit and non-responsive. If I hit the power button, it brightens up and becomes active again.

I get this all the time. Might be something intentional, to discourage use of the phone during driving.

I dislike that sometime in the last year or so, they eliminated "now playing" controls from the bottom of the car screen. I use Waze, and now you have to switch apps to pause something. This week I learned that if you use Google Maps, you have the option to do a splitscreen thing where part of the screen is Maps and maybe 2/5 of it is a now playing screen with controls. Great, now add that to Waze.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

Since the Android Auto update hit my phone with the new UI, I've had a handful of situations where my phone screen will look active while connected, but be dimmed a bit and non-responsive. If I hit the power button, it brightens up and becomes active again.

I get this all the time. Might be something intentional, to discourage use of the phone during driving.

I dislike that sometime in the last year or so, they eliminated "now playing" controls from the bottom of the car screen. I use Waze, and now you have to switch apps to pause something. This week I learned that if you use Google Maps, you have the option to do a splitscreen thing where part of the screen is Maps and maybe 2/5 of it is a now playing screen with controls. Great, now add that to Waze.

The inactive screen is new to my phone in the last few weeks. Never happened before.

I do like the split screen with Maps/Audio that just rolled out in the new UI. I've got an aftermarket box that is kind of a hacked in solution for my car that wasn't sold with Android Auto, and the stock screen isn't touch in the first place. I navigate by the dial and navigation buttons on my console or wheel. But if I had touch, it looks great

I've thought about buying one of the screen replacement systems available that does similar to mine, but is a whole android device that also allows for Android Auto and Car Play with touch screen. It still allows for you to switch to the stock interface for real car stuff. Probably will break down and buy it soon. Seems like over the past year, a lot of the jank from those systems have been worked out. Question is, buy from AliExpress and pay $100-$300 less, or buy from one of the places that advertises and has some semblance of direct customer support and play a bunch more money? They're probably all made in the same Chinese factories with slightly different firmware and maybe core processor chips.

I will probably never buy a car that doesn't have Android Auto, but if I do, I will 100% buy a third party solution.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I will probably never buy a car that doesn't have Android Auto, but if I do, I will 100% buy a third party solution.

I bought a used end of gen S4 3 years ago. Current gen has AA, but last gen didn't.

I'm a Waze user too - and after being really frustrated by the new screen layout I dug into the Settings and found you can switch back to the older view with the audio controls across the bottom. You have to load the app on your phone to change the setting from the new default one, or at least that's how I did it.

d4m0 wrote:

I'm a Waze user too - and after being really frustrated by the new screen layout I dug into the Settings and found you can switch back to the older view with the audio controls across the bottom. You have to load the app on your phone to change the setting from the new default one, or at least that's how I did it.

The Android Auto app? This is great information!

You know what, turns out I was wrong about the Android Auto app settings. I just double checked this on my phone and I must have made the change in the settings in the car, not in the app on my phone. Sorry about that. I would've mentioned it sooner but I've been away from the site for some days.

d4m0 wrote:

You know what, turns out I was wrong about the Android Auto app settings. I just double checked this on my phone and I must have made the change in the settings in the car, not in the app on my phone. Sorry about that. I would've mentioned it sooner but I've been away from the site for some days.

No worries. I'll try to take a look at it this weekend - would be very nice to get that back.

I got it back, and I owe it all to you!

And weren't you the one who first mentioned Perilaxe Occlusion in the metal thread a couple years ago? I still love them (and listen to them in my car, to keep it topical ).

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I got it back, and I owe it all to you!

And weren't you the one who first mentioned Perilaxe Occlusion in the metal thread a couple years ago? I still love them (and listen to them in my car, to keep it topical ).

Indeed that was me! You're welcome
This one might scratch that same itch for you, also great car listening! Ok now back to your regularly scheduled Android posts...

Are there no alternatives to the .nomedia files to keep images in a particular folder to being picked up as something Google Photos might want to back up? I'm tired of dealing with audiobook covers every time I add a new book to /audiobooks folder. Can't even right the file to that folder.

It's been broken for a long time, I'm just finally getting around to trying to figure out an alternative.

I assume this is just another thing Google did away with that's annoying for users that do things slightly more sophisticated than the norm.

I thought that still worked. You can also name the directory with a . in front and that should keep anything in there from showing up in most apps. Unless the app has a show hidden files option.

But if it's a default directory you can't change, not sure.

I think photos itself also has options to exclude directories. Like I exclude text message images from getting backed up again. They should already be saved with the texts.

I might be misunderstanding, but Mannish are you saying you don't see a settings option to unselect folders that Google Photos backs up? Under settings/backup:

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/yYqsYM3d/Screenshot-20230307-140439-Photos.jpg)

From there I can select any folder I want Google Photos to avoid backing up.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I might be misunderstanding, but Mannish are you saying you don't see a settings option to unselect folders that Google Photos backs up? Under settings/backup:

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/yYqsYM3d/Screenshot-20230307-140439-Photos.jpg)

From there I can select any folder I want Google Photos to avoid backing up.

It's not just google photos, it's also OneDrive.

And I've set that in the past, but what happens is it sees a new subfolder, and helpfully tries to back up that one, or show book covers in "recent images" in the phone's file manager.

Stele wrote:

I thought that still worked. You can also name the directory with a . in front and that should keep anything in there from showing up in most apps. Unless the app has a show hidden files option.

It might still work some places, but I have a folder called /audiobooks . As soon as I drop a .nomedia file in that folder, it deletes it. Found some mention of that around the web, so it's not just me.

Interesting. My Google Photos never tells me anything about new folders. I also use OneDrive and disable folders from being added here:
IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/LXsDwkdP/Screenshot-20230307-172713-One-Drive.jpg)

If it ever asks me to back up a folder I just hit cancel. I can see that being annoying if it asks for every single subfolder though. Not a fan of Samsung's file browser, for that and other reasons.

Here's a thing I've never figured out. Gboard had learned all of my sibling's names so I can swipe type them no problem, except for my sister. No matter how many times I type it out, it never even suggests it when I swipe it. I thought maybe because I was using her nickname instead of her full name, so I changed her name in my contacts list to the nickname but still Gboard won't remember it. Any thoughts on what's going on?

That's weird. First time something has a red squiggle I tap it then tap it again in the suggestions above the keyboard like "yes I really mean that" and after that it just works.

I've had so many issues with autocorrect/preguessing since I got my new phone, Pixel 7 Pro, a few months ago. I don't know if I broke my prior training or something else changed in that time, but it's much less reliable.

Here's a question for my fellow Android Auto users: There's a setting that you can get to while driving about whether you want maps to switch between day and night modes automatically, which would be very nice. It doesn't work in my vehicle, which is a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Not sure if there's another setting that's conflicting or something, or if it doesn't work in my specific ride, etc. To be fair the screen brightness settings in AA have always been kind of wonky.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Here's a question for my fellow Android Auto users: There's a setting that you can get to while driving about whether you want maps to switch between day and night modes automatically, which would be very nice. It doesn't work in my vehicle, which is a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Not sure if there's another setting that's conflicting or something, or if it doesn't work in my specific ride, etc. To be fair the screen brightness settings in AA have always been kind of wonky.

I've put in one of the Android Auto boxes that uses my stock Audi screen (Pre-Android Auto from factory). It doesn't work either. There was a brief period right after the last big UI update when it worked, now it is back to not working. I have to go into settings to flip it from night to day, then back again to get the dark screen. And auto never works. I only had that brief period of time when it did.

I assumed it was just the aftermarket hacked together system.

Today I just installed a whole new touch screen replacement Android system and it will show me night maps if that's the setting without me having to toggle it back and forth, but it still does not honor the auto-setting.

If you figure it out, please post.

It worked for me a long time ago. I just Googled it, and there's a lot of people experiencing the same issue.

I think, if I read it right, that someone suggested that if you have your car's dashboard brightness set to max then that may break the auto setting. I will try to remember to play with that tomorrow.

EDIT: THAT FIXED IT! I turned my instrument brightness down one click and now day/night is automatic again!

It's silly how happy a little thing like this makes me, but I think the happiness is actually because something that wasn't working correctly is now doing so.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

It worked for me a long time ago. I just Googled it, and there's a lot of people experiencing the same issue.

I think, if I read it right, that someone suggested that if you have your car's dashboard brightness set to max then that may break the auto setting. I will try to remember to play with that tomorrow.

EDIT: THAT FIXED IT! I turned my instrument brightness down one click and now day/night is automatic again!

It's silly how happy a little thing like this makes me, but I think the happiness is actually because something that wasn't working correctly is now doing so.

Doubt that's it for me as I don't like bright dash lights at night. I keep mine pretty low to keep my eyes more adjusted to the dark.

Mine's probably just the aftermarket head unit doesn't get the info from the dash lights or something. You'd think it would because it's got Canbus interface, but who knows?

Don't know if this setting might help some of the complaints about icons on Coolwalk Android Auto. I don't think I'll make the trade off, but may play around with the setting.:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/h...

Fedaykin98 wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

Since the Android Auto update hit my phone with the new UI, I've had a handful of situations where my phone screen will look active while connected, but be dimmed a bit and non-responsive. If I hit the power button, it brightens up and becomes active again.

I get this all the time. Might be something intentional, to discourage use of the phone during driving.

I dislike that sometime in the last year or so, they eliminated "now playing" controls from the bottom of the car screen. I use Waze, and now you have to switch apps to pause something. This week I learned that if you use Google Maps, you have the option to do a splitscreen thing where part of the screen is Maps and maybe 2/5 of it is a now playing screen with controls. Great, now add that to Waze.

They have added this split-screen feature to Waze now, which is great, although I'm not too high on the changes to the general Waze interface on AA, which I thought was perfect as well.

Also, this weekend when I've used voice commands like "Drive to X", Google has interpreted "drive" as "Dr", meaning an address, not a command to navigate, so I've had to manually select destinations. This hasn't been a problem for the last 5ish years, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.

I always say "navigate to x"

Stele wrote:

I always say "navigate to x" ;)

Same. I think "take me to..." can also work. "Take me home" isn't just a John Denver lyric, it works for Google, too.

EDIT: I do have a Google Maps/Assistant question. Is there a way to report an alert like a speed trap or item in road by voice? I now have a touch screen with my in dash unit, but when I was using the non-touch screen stock screen with the Android box interfaced in, the interface was all via manual controls and I never figured it out. Searched a couple of time and never found it.