Sailfish phone usage in cars (like Android Auto or Car Play)

General
1

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?

2

No.

Most (if not all) car mfgs donā€™t even know SFOS exists.

BT is the only way at the moment.

3

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

4

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 ā€˜safeā€™ 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. Iā€™m not willing to pay that money upfront to experiment with something Iā€™m not even sure will work / is possible.

What is worse, Mirrorlink has been discontinued, and for what itā€™s worth, new cars donā€™t 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 Iā€™d guess itā€™s proprietary and canā€™t be easily reverse-engineered. Perhaps the most viable option would be to develop a device like the Motorola MA1 that can ā€œpiggybackā€ off the carā€™s Android Auto support and provide a software interface for Sailfish to talk to, but Iā€™m not the guy to try it.

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5

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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6

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.