Aperture Science, Inc.

I have spent the last week reading up on in-car technologies. I thought I had been paying attention the past 15 some odd years, but apparently I managed to miss the majority of the details. So here's a somewhat opinionated summary of what I've learned.

CarPlay (iPhone) and Android Auto (Android) let you use your smartphone on the car's infotainment screen. In the stone age you'd use a RAM mount on the dash to look at your actual smartphone screen. Now that cars have cameras and massive infotainment screens built-in, I guess it seems like a waste to not use that screen for your phone.

Android Automotive is a version of Android that IS a car's infotainment software. Considering how much people want to replace the car's native infotainment software, I guess it's not surprise that some car makers go for this option. Its got the usual android app permissions model. There's even an app store; only specific apps are supported, but that support extends pretty far, and includes "I swear I'll only use this in a parking lot" games like Candy Crush.

Android Automotive has multiuser support, via profiles. There's also a guest user profile, which seems like just another profile, but settings changes made to the guest user don't seem to persist, and get reset when the car is turned off. The active user profile can be changed at (mostly?) anytime; there's some lockscreen-style security options for auth when switching profiles that I haven't tried out yet.

It seems like profiles should be able to manage a whole bunch of settings. But actually... I have no f'ing idea what they manage because all I seem to find is exceptions. Ex: my car has an audio app, that combines AM/FM radio with SiriusXM and playing from USB. Every time I get in the car it forgets what I was listening to, and one time even forgot I had turned it off. Additionally, most (but not all!) of the settings that directly affect how the car drives are not even accessible from the infotainment screen's settings menu, they're only available from the speedometer screen's settings menu, and (AFAICT...) don't care about user profiles at all. So far the only setting I'm positive the user profile manages is the choice of animated background wallpaper for the speedometer screen. (WTH to every part of that sentence.)

I fully expect to spend at least another two months figuring out how to work everything in this car.