The system of newer cars usually have support for Apples Car Play and Android Auto to mirror apps and use the phone with the cars controls. Is there any simliar app or feature for Sailfish OS?
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No.
Most (if not all) car mfgs donāt even know SFOS exists.
BT is the only way at the moment.
If better bluetooth is ever developed to allow more complex information exchange than just music control I would like to see a SFOS for some chinesse car tablets so many can enjoy their car running something else than ios/android
A long time ago people were wondering if Mirrorlink was an option. There was some good discussion here: https://together.jolla.com/question/6613/sailfish-car-mode-ui-or-future-sailfishjolla-ivi/
My car has Mirrorlink, and I looked into it about twelve months ago. From what I could tell, however, the Car Connectivity Consortium, who are the people behind Mirrorlink, require your software to be vetted (presumably to ensure it is āsafeā for someone to operate while driving) before they grant it a license to talk to the car. Without said license, the car will refuse to talk to the app. In addition, this license and the developer SDK cost money. Iām not willing to pay that money upfront to experiment with something Iām not even sure will work / is possible.
What is worse, Mirrorlink has been discontinued, and for what itās worth, new cars donāt support it anymore. So even if by some miracle you did get it working, only people with 5-10 year old cars could use it.
I have no idea what technologies Google and Apple use to talk to cars, but in both cases Iād guess itās proprietary and canāt be easily reverse-engineered. Perhaps the most viable option would be to develop a device like the Motorola MA1 that can āpiggybackā off the carās Android Auto support and provide a software interface for Sailfish to talk to, but Iām not the guy to try it.
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Maybe not easy, but at least the Android Auto protocol has been reverse engineered. There are open source implementations for both ends of the connection:
Of course, making anything useful out of those is probably still quite a lot of work.
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This is better what I thought. I am always wondering, why Jolla does Seafarix, but there is no open protocol which can be usedā¦most likely because of the automotive OEMs.
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Iāve started poking at this a bit, using the existing open-source reverse-engineered AA code mentioned upthread as a reference point.
Iām keeping the ambition level very low for now. Not āAndroid Auto on Sailfish,ā but rather: can I get the phone to present itself in such a way that the car even starts to treat it as an Android Auto candidate, and what exactly happens next.
So far Iāve managed to get the car to recognize the Jolla as something it wants to try Android Auto with, which is more than I expected this early, but the connection still falls over shortly afterwards. So the interesting part now seems to be beyond the first USB/accessory-level detection and into the next bit of protocol.
In other words: not there, but no longer entirely filled with unknowns either.
If anyone has spent time with the device side of the existing AA reverse-engineering work, or with USB gadget/accessory behaviour on Sailfish/Linux, Iād be very glad to compare notes.
Edit: I should have said Iām working with a 10ii
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As of now, Iāve been looking into what the different USB modes on the phone actually do when you plug it into something. In the car, if I select MTP or Developer Mode, it reaches the Android Auto / MirrorLink chooser quickly. If I do nothing, the car spends about 60 seconds trying to read the phone as USB storage first, then falls through to the AA / ML chooser.
So at least at that level, the USB mode choice clearly affects how the car classifies the phone.
Iāve also been experimenting with the Sailfish USB mode definitions to see whether itās possible to add a fourth mode ā something like a dedicated āCarā mode ā as a clean way to test AA-related USB behaviour without disturbing the existing ones.
UPDATE: I have a different car now that wants to be wireless. Iāll have to figure out if it will even talk Android Auto over USB 
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Does anyone know which model cars come with Jollaās Seafarix installed? Does that look/feel at all like Sailfish or integrate well with a Sailfish OS phone?
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Thatās s very interesting question!
It was shown at CES in a ā2026 Mercedes-Benz CLA 250+ā: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/seafarix_ces-automotivesoftware-invehicleux-activity-7417891511196864513-zpIm
I donāt know whether that means that this vehicle is intended to ship with that software, or that it was a demo unit and the software may appear in other vehicles.
Since 2023, the Mercedes E-Classā OS has apparently been based on Seafarixās version of SFOS, including AAS.
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