Delve deeper into Android Auto

1. Android Auto
Developers, Start your Engines!
By:- Dhiraj Bharara

2. The Smartphone Realm
 Phones contains our Contacts, Music, Appointments and a whole lot
of information.
 Phones are connected to internet and cloud.
 A person checks his phone 125 times/day on an average

3. The Car Realm
Cars are vital for our life & indispensable
Used in trips, take us to work.
 An average American spend 90 minutes daily in car.
25% of the accidents are due to fumbling with phone while driving.

4. Disconnected!
Car Pardigm Smartphone Paradigm
 Using phone while driving: Life threatening
 Using phone while driving is still done, as its compelling to do.
 Phones provide a personlaize experience, we need to get that to the
car.

5. Developers have Challenges to mingle the two
realms
 Many Auto Platforms
 Distribution difficulties
 Abiding Safety Regulations
 Connectivity + Personalization

6. Googles Journey in Auto space
These are Cloud connected solutions
Geo data delivered to internet connected cars
These are available in the market and running.

7. Car Robust Hardware
Giant Battery
6 inch Touch screen
Accessible Controls
on steering
Mike
Surround speaker &
Driver speakerGPS
Compass

8. Varied Car hardware
 Control systems in cars from different manufaturers, are different.
 Android Auto will handle these issues out. Application developers do not
have to care about it.

9. Android + Car
(A Personalised Experience)
 Google collaborated with car manufaturers to integrate with the car Head
Unit & the underlying hardware.
Android L Car Head Unit

10. Internal Diagram of the Integration
The low level hardware in the car communicates with the Android
protocol.

11. On the car end: Android Auto Receiver
Library
 A small library in the car, Android Auto Receiver Library.
 Its a protocol stack & a set of interfaces to the car hardware.
 It allows automakers to consistently integrate car hardware with Android
auto.

12. On the phone end: Car Service
The other end of the protocol stack is component called car service.
 Car service is distributed in Google play service.

13. UI & UX
 The UX team at google have pondered a lot, after going through a
whole lot of legal and safety regulation documents world over.
 So you don't have to go through the legal aspects involved.
 No Youtube videos or no gaming on the car head unit. Minimal
driver distraction.
 Things taken care by UX team font size, contrast ratio, maximum
task completion time etc.

14. UI & UX
 The Landing page
Mike on Top
right corner to
verbally
interact
Activity Bar
Navigation Communication Media
Car Related Stuff

15. Google Voice comes to your rescue!
 Connected to Google Knowledge graph.
 You can ask it almost anything.
 To navigate somewhere.
 To set reminders.
 Call somebody
 Text a friend.
 Ask it to play media.
 Ask anything related to Google knowledge graph. "What will be the weather
tomorrow?"

16. Peeping Inside!
 To format the data while
communicating google uses
Protocol Buffer.
 Protocol buffers are Google's
language-neutral, platform-neutral,
extensible mechanism for serializing
structured data
 They are an open source google
Technology.
 It allows to add new features, whilst
retaining backward compatibility.

17. UI Interactions
Different Input methods viz. Touch Screens and hard rotary controllers

18. Routing Audio: Based on type of audio
 Music is played to all speakers.
 Navigation instructions are played to driver's speakers.
 The car and android negotiate for audio focus at times.
 The car audio has higher priority, to ensure delivery of safety critical
notifications.

19. More Accurate Driving Directions

20. More Accurate Driving Directions
 Google Maps is much easier & more visible on a large screen-front
& center-on the mount of dashboard.
 Google has redesigned the maps, for Horizontal aspect ratio
 The UI is optimized for use in car.
 Biggest advatages of Google maps, is it uses Fused Location
provider. Use the GPS data from the car.
 We can also use Car's compass,gyroscopes, wheel speed and
other positioning sensors to work out the exact position.

21. Apps Supported

22. Prerequisites
 Android 5.0 (API level 21) provides new APIs for implementing
audio playback and messaging that is compatible with Auto.
 Set targetsdkversion to 21 in the manifest.
 Install the support library: If you are building messaging apps for
auto, you need the NotificationCompat.CarExtender class contained
in the v4 Support Library.
 Above class allows you to create notifications that are compatible
with Auto devices.

23. Two places to make entry

24. Entry in an XML file
 Specify the car capabilities that your app uses in an XML.
 Create a file called automotive_app_desc.xml and store it under
your projects’s res/xml/ folder.
 The files contains the following metadata
 The name attribute indicates the specific capability of your app.
Allowed values are Notification & Media.

25. Add a manifest entry
 Add a "com.google.android.gms.car.application" metadata entry under the
<application> element that references the auto xml configuration file

26. Apps compatible

27. Developer Comments
"We were able to get messaging functionality for text
implemented easily on Android Auto, with minimal
development effort. We're excited to participate in
Android Auto which provides a notification interface for
the car that is both user-friendly and highly safety-
minded."
"Android Auto connects NPR One listeners to a
personalized stream of public radio news and stories
to catch up on in the car. It's an engaging and driver-
safe user experience that was developed using the
media APIs provided in Android 5.0. The available
development tools made the integration and testing
process simple for launching in a short period of time."

28. Android Auto is coming soon to new cars from
these manufacturers

29. Resources
 Google I/O 2014
 developer.android.com/auto
 developers.google.com

30. Questions Please?