For people who didn’t have anAndroid Autohead unit in their car, there have been decent alternatives to turn their phone into a workable Android Auto device. However, over the past few years, Google has been less than excited about letting people use Android Auto directly on their smartphones. There’s now going to be another nail in the coffin for this particular experience, with a report detailing the company’s plans to deprecate Driving Mode, which currently resides within Google Maps.
For some additional context, Maps Driving Mode was supposed to serve as the alternative to the similarly named Assistant Driving Mode, which saw its Dashboard viewremoved last yearin favor of a more streamlined view on Google Maps. We’re now learning that Maps Driving Mode could go away by February 2024, courtesy of strings discovered within the Google app (v14.52) by9to5Google, which the site claims are not yet widely visible.
Goodbye, Maps Driving Mode
One of the strings plainly mentions that Maps Driving Mode would be “going away in February.” Another discusses how users would be directed to access Assistant via the mic icon “to call, message, or play media while navigating,” possibly as an alternative.
Google’s reasoning for retiring Assistant Driving Mode last year made a great deal of sense, especially since most users were found to be accessing it from Google Maps anyway. Furthermore, enabling Assistant Driving Mode for the first time required a voice command, though a home screen shortcut wasadded laterfor convenience. So it wasn’t the most well-known solution among the users.
The folks at 9to5 speculate that this newly discovered deprecation would leave drivers with the basic navigation mode that can be triggered with the “Hey Google, launch driving mode” command, as shown above. There’s also the revamped voice controls powered by Assistant that made it to Mapsthis July.
Since this is an early discovery within the Google app, the company hasn’t officially confirmed or denied this development. But if you’ve observed the slow regression of the Android Auto on phones, this news won’t particularly come as a shock. Google unceremoniously killed offAndroid Auto for phone screenslast year, making Assistant Driving Mode the only alternative, only to shut it down later and replace it with Maps Driving Mode, which now appears to be on its last legs.
So what’s next for Android Auto on yourAndroid smartphone? It’s hard to predict based on Google’s extensive history ofkilling its products, but we hope there’s a viable alternative in the works as not everybody has a compatible infotainment screen or head unit to support the full Android Auto experience.
Away from this disheartening news, it’s been a busy few days for the AA team, as Google enabledwallpaper matching with phonesthis week. We also learned thatAI-generated message summariescould be coming to Android Auto in the near future to break down the often confusing and lengthy group conversations.
