Gadgetory

hey twin I am currently driving an Apple car I thought you were driving a Chevy Malibu okay it's not an Apple car but it does have Apple car play which means I can plug my iPhone into the dashboard and get access to all of my apps and iMessages and Siri and it's all powered by the phone it's funny that you say that because the Honda Civic that I'm driving has both apple carplay and android auto except I'm like you I'm using Android auto which is similar and that I plug my Android phone into the dashboard and I have access to all kinds of Android functions but I think there's still some differences we should probably tell people about they said my experience so far using alpha carplay is basically like having a giant iPhone on your dashboard the app icons looked exactly the same the only difference is this status bar on the side here which shows you time of day has a home button and it shows you your cell signal strength so Android auto doesn't have that grid-like app format instead what you're going to see are a bunch of notifications or if you're familiar with Android cards that pop up as you need them and then below that there are some action icons for things that you would want quick access to in your car but to be clear it's not like you download apps directly to your car dashboard right you're still downloading apps onto your smartphone and then that's what's powering the dashboard also not all of the apps there on your iPhone are going to show up on carplay so there are some third-party audio apps you can access like Spotify or Pandora or a podcasting app but it's not like you're going to run a third party photo app from your car play dashboard same with Android auto there are some third-party apps that you can access through this but it's not like you're going to be able to access all of the apps on your smartphone let's talk about Macs yes let's talk about Mac's one of the more obvious benefits of having something like a car play or an Android auto is having your smartphone's Maps app directly on your dashboard instead of using your car's navigation system which in some cases might not get live updates yeah but with apple carplay you have to use Apple Maps whereas with Android auto you get to use Google Maps and it's a pretty standard Google Maps interface also with Google Maps Android auto you can pinch to zoom whereas with Apple Maps you have to use zoom buttons in order to zoom in on the map you know Apple Maps has gotten a lot better I don't appreciate the shade yeah here Apple absolutely better when the next version of iOS comes out also apple carplay has iMessage whoops which will be read aloud to you and you can respond with your voice yeah but you can't reply to third-party apps with apple carplay whereas with Android auto messages from third-party apps like Skype and kik and whatsapp will be read aloud to you and then you can actually reply with your voice as well another benefit to apple carplay is having siri directly in your car dashboard so you just long press a button on your steering wheel and then you can ask Siri for directions or to open certain apps and she'll do it for you yeah Android auto has voice control too in fact a lot of the interactions are through voice control in theory this is all supposed to be less distracting another small difference between the two is that you can still interact with your iPhone when it's plugged in and powering carplay but you can't interact with your Android phone while you have it plugged in using Android auto yeah this goes back to the distraction thing you can't do that now but maybe in a future update you'll be able to interact with your Android phone while it's plugged in and I bet it might be less buggy to yeah I bet that update will be less buggy for you too because in our experience Android auto has crashed a little bit more than carplay has well maybe that's the cars fault I mean even when you give your entire dashboard over to the phone it doesn't mean the car maker can't still screw things up the bottom line is that carplay and android auto or we'll let you do some of the things that you do on your smartphone but directly on your car dashboard and offer a more familiar interface at the same time also another added benefit is that you get updates to these dashboards when your smartphone gets updated as opposed to waiting around for car manufacturer updates all right that was fun but what do you need to have this kind of experience in your car well first off you need a car that actually supports apple carplay or Android auto because it's not like you can just plug your smartphone into any vehicle right I mean overall are these plug-and-play solutions better than a lot of the car manufacturer designed smart interfaces I would say yes based on my experience and I really liked apple carplay but also keep in mind that some of the frustrations you have with apps on your smartphone are also going to translate to the car dashboard I mean apps crash serious and perfect and stuff like that also we still don't know exactly how distracting it's going to be when people have notifications and a bunch of other stuff popping up on their car dashboard so stay safe out there kids stay safe Siri I can turn on the air conditioner because audio is high I'm so hot I like I can't even tell you how much I'm sweating right now it's so gross I think you're gonna be the drippy sweat interesting but I have Siri so that's good