Android Auto is supposed to make driving easier, but if it’s more annoying than your phone to use, it falls apart quickly. This is especially true when you’re faced with sluggish animations, laggy inputs, and an interface that takes ages to open apps.
The good news is that Android Auto has a hidden developer menu that can make wireless performance feel smoother.
Your phone isn’t the only thing that struggles when Android Auto starts lagging
Your weakest link may not be your phone
An incredibly common misconception about Android Auto is that its performance depends solely on your phone’s raw processing power. People think that the car screen is just a “dumb” display projected by the phone and immediately blame the phone when the interface stutters.
While the phone is entirely the device that handles the processing load that goes into Android Auto, your car’s head unit is still an active processing partner.
Rather than simply mirroring your phone’s screen, wireless Android Auto is essentially a compressed stream of video and audio that your car must decode and display in real-time.
The head unit must decode a continuous stream of video and audio, send the audio signal to the speakers, manage touch inputs, and at the same time receive and send data over Wi-Fi.
Unfortunately, many cars use cheap and often outdated processors to handle this connection, forcing the chip to max out and potentially overheat, causing it to struggle even more.
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AAW wireless
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5.5 × 3.5 × 1.5 cm
AAWireless TWO+ provides instant wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity with a multi-function button designed for quick pairing and seamless switching between Android and iPhone devices.
Along with processing power, small hardware limitations can also affect how smooth Android Auto feels. Even the polling rate of the digitizer (the part that controls the touch inputs) can affect the experience. When you tap or swipe a button on the screen, it can take hundreds of milliseconds to register that your finger made contact, if the car’s polling rate is only a few times per second.
Hardware is not alone problemalthough. A lack of software updates may also be partly to blame. Google updates Android Auto fairly regularly, and some of these updates may introduce major feature improvements, redesigns, and other enhancements.
If it has been several years since you bought your car and the manufacturer does not send OTA updates, the software may be problematic. The infotainment system was built and optimized for the older version of Android Auto, and over time the gap between modern Android Auto code and your car’s older software and hardware widens considerably.
The easiest way to understand all of this is to think of Android Auto as video game streaming.
If you have a powerful gaming PC that renders the game flawlessly at a higher resolution and frame rate, but try to stream it over Wi-Fi to a 10-year-old laptop with a weak network card and processor, the game will lag, drop frames, and become unresponsive, even though it’s technically running on your gaming PC, not your laptop.
This hidden Android Auto setting lowers the resolution and makes everything smoother
A small quality trade-off for a smoother Android Auto
As with most other devices, it is one of the best ways improve performance and responsiveness is to reduce the amount of work your phone and car’s infotainment system has to do.
Video streaming is arguably the most demanding part of the entire Android Auto experience. By lowering the resolution, your phone has fewer pixels to display and encode, and your head unit has less data to decode and display. It also reduces the amount of data sent over the wireless connection and simplifies the entire process on the hardware.
The downside is a drop in sharpness and image quality, but that’s a small price to pay if it means Android Auto will finally be smooth and usable again.
To find this hidden option, open your phone’s Settings, search for “Android Auto,” and tap the result to open the Android Auto settings menu.
Scroll down Versionthen tap it ten times until you see a prompt to activate it developer settings on your phone. hit OK to confirm.
Then click three point menu in the upper right corner and choose Developer settings. hit Video Resolutionthen select the resolution you want Android Auto to use. Depending on your car’s Android Auto display, you may only have a 720p display anyway, so that’s a good starting point Allow up to 1280×720 or 720×1280.
Reconnect your phone to your car’s head unit and test Android Auto. If it looks and feels the same, lower the resolution to 800×480.
Depending on your car’s head unit, lowering the resolution may also affect scaling. This can cause items to appear larger in Android Auto, although the exact result depends on how your head unit handles the low-resolution stream.
Either way, if the higher resolution puts too much strain on either your phone or the car’s system, the difference in performance should be immediately noticeable.
A wireless adapter can often provide a better experience than cheap factory setups
Your car’s built-in wireless isn’t always a winner
One of the easiest ways to reduce the workload of keeping Android Auto running smoothly switch to wired connection. This completely eliminates the need to transfer data over a 5 GHz wireless connection, replacing it with a more stable and reliable wired data connection.
However, wired connections reduce the convenience that Android Auto offers, which is hard to argue against. If you’re going on a 3-hour road trip, it’s easy enough to plug in your phone, but for short rides around town, wireless is hard to beat.
Fortunately, there’s another way to reduce how much work your car’s head unit has to do while maintaining the convenience of wireless communication: wireless Android Auto adapter.
These dongles plug into your car’s USB port and allow your wired Android Auto system to communicate wirelessly with your phone. From the car’s perspective, it still uses the normal wired Android Auto connection, while the adapter handles the wireless connection between the car and your phone.
A wireless dongle won’t magically speed up every car, but it can improve the experience in some older cars by reducing workload and offering a more consistent connection.
Sometimes the best solution is to force Android Auto to run less
If you don’t mind sacrificing a bit of sharpness, reducing Android Auto’s streaming resolution is one of the easiest ways to make it feel smoother. A wireless Android Auto key can sometimes help performance, especially if your head unit is the culprit and not your phone.
Before you replace your phone or blame your car’s hardware, try to reduce the workload Android Auto has to handle.
