As many of us learned the hard way, there are many reasons potentially causing Android Auto to fail to launch, and one of them concerns a bad cable or a glitch introduced by a new update.
Such a problem was reported on Google’s forums in September this year when users revealed that running
Android Auto on the head units in their cars was no longer possible because the app icon never showed up. On the other hand, Android Auto was launching correctly on the smartphone, and this signaled a potential connectivity problem with the infotainment system.
Google first confirmed it’s looking into the whole thing in early September, but a member of the Android Auto has now returned to ask for more information, explaining the company needs logs to figure out what’s happening on the impacted devices.
Furthermore, Google wants to know if the latest Android Auto update resolves the whole thing, so there’s a chance version 5.8 introduces additional connectivity enhancements.
“Could you please let us know if you are still facing this issue after the recent app updates,” the Android Auto team asked. “It would be great if you could send us a bug report from your phone to diagnose the root cause of the issue. We’ll send an email with the instructions on how to capture a bug report. Please reply directly to the email with your information.”
For the time being, no workaround is known to exist, but if the whole thing started happening after an Android Auto update, simply downgrading to the previous release should help restore the working behavior in the car.
At this point, it’s not yet known when Google could come up with a fix, so you’d better not hold your breath for it. If anything, a new Android Auto update will land in a few weeks as version 5.9, and it will be the last release of the year.
