3 Apple CarPlay Features That Android Auto Desperately Needs

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay have tricks that make it seamless to get your phone's apps and features onto your car's built-in infotainment display. Thanks to them, you can easily access turn-by-turn navigation, music streaming services, weather forecast, and a lot directly from your phone on your car screen. Both are also pretty powerful and constantly updated with new features.

However, there are still things that one does better than the other. For example, Android Auto has a bigger selection of apps and a more powerful voice assistant, which will get even better with Gemini AI integration inside your car. It also allows you to play select HTML5 games when the car is not being driven – something you can't do natively on CarPlay. Similarly, there are some things at which Apple CarPlay excels, and Android Auto can benefit by incorporating them. So, here are the top three things that we feel Google should add to Android Auto at the earliest to deliver a better in-car experience.

One of the biggest new features to reach Apple CarPlay in iOS 26 is the support for customizable widgets, which further enhances the already better CarPlay Dashboard experience for iPhone owners. This feature allows iPhone owners to add widgets from virtually any iPhone app and get glanceable information right on the CarPlay Dashboard, including calendar events, music controls, smart home controls, and weather information. Depending on the size and form factor of the infotainment screen, you can display one or two widget stacks of up to five widgets each.

Android Auto really needs this feature to take its own dashboard experience to the next level. At the moment, the information on its dashboard is limited to just navigation and sometimes another accompanying app. While there is already support for widgets in Android Auto, it's very limited, and they auto-appear in the navigation bar based on what you're doing. The selection is also limited to dialer, navigation, and media widgets. Fortunately, Android Auto is said to get new CarPlay-like widgets, and the same has been spotted in the beta version of the Android Auto app.

Calls, messages, and other notifications can be a massive distraction when you are driving, and are best avoided until you can park your vehicle at a safe place. Apple CarPlay helps you avoid a lot of these unnecessary notifications by offering a solid Driving Focus mode, which not only silences any incoming notifications but also allows you to share your Focus Status with apps. This allows apps to show your contacts that you have silenced notifications since you're driving, making it less likely for them to ping you unless it's something important.

Android Auto has similar Do Not Disturb options that can disable unnecessary notifications and help you focus on the road. However, it lacks any way to let the apps on your phone know that you have enabled DND because you're driving. It's a nice quality of life improvement that can be a big help to anyone using Android Auto. 

Another nifty little feature that CarPlay has but is absent on Android Auto is Siri's ability to describe a photo that you receive on iMessage. Thanks to this, you can get a basic idea of what you may have received. While the descriptions aren't always perfect, the presence of this feature can certainly be helpful. This, along with Siri's announcement of incoming text messages, allows you to avoid unnecessary interaction with your phone or CarPlay when driving.

While Android Auto can also read out your received messages and provide AI summaries of longer ones, it doesn't currently possess the ability to describe any pictures included in them. This is a surprising miss on Google's part, but as the company integrates Gemini AI more deeply in the Android Auto experience, it will hopefully add the ability to describe the photos you receive in your messages.