Android Auto, Roadmap? my experience.

[geniusled]

Preface

As i join car culture i have been enjoying Android auto a lot.
Ive tried multiple times to make use of the android auto jellyfin feature but faced some limitations/discomforts making it very little useable.

Context

Im a big jellyfin android user for movies, tv shows and chromecast.I use it everyday. Im trying to eliminate youtube music from my day to day use and building my music library in jellyfin gradually, i love the fact theres some good building block for android auto.

Question

Im wondering if theres some sort of roadmap to MVP/ basic stable useability planned or in the works or even intent to support this platform?

My Experience

Note:

All next items are not to be seen as hate/critism, im aware of the large amount of work behind the jellyfin android app, i dont want to discount any efforts made and im trying to maybe facilitate improvements by clearly listing my experience

Jellyfin native android auto support:

i was super happy to see it pop on the head unit, first impressions are good, i love that i can scroll through artists (not possible on ytm), search by artist first letter is great.

Playing an album:

i pressed the first album i wanted in "albums" category on the headunit, it played through, split view with google maps was great, steering buttons work great. Good experience overall.

Searching for an artist.

I Was trying to find "the police", couldnt find it.. Looks like my artist list stops at "The C*..." A bit odd, seems alot of the library is missing. (Later found discussions here about AA limitations to 100 items in list, i suppose that explains the why, understandable but no solutions provided). Not super great.
Pulled up my phone and started to play the police, good!...right? The player on screen did not show the track playing (it was) but the phone did. As the track ended, the next track played was the initial album chosen on AA and not the next cued track on the phone. Not super great.
It seems theres a desync with whats playing on the phone app than the AA app, a bit akward and confusing. as mentioned here and here

play,stop,resume

Playing > turn off car > start car > music resumed. This seems to work great, nothing to complain about here.
Edit: im noticing theres some inconsistencies about what content is restarted on resume. sometimes its where it last stopped, sometimes its some song (always the same it seems?) im not sure why.

Only music?

No other media was listed, either parked or rolling, there seem to never have an opportunity to choose movies or shows. Not a huge thing but i couldnt find explicit info on this. I kind of assumed that when parked it would be possible to play other media. Documentation could be improved, i can do some effort here, but i dont know where to put jellyfin-android specific documentation

Documentation

It seems theres not much documentation available on what/how everything works with AA/Jellyfin android, i think some work could be done there to set expectations and limit deception on available features/functionality. I would be glad to contribute on this as time goes.

Now, im aware all these things represent developping time and efforts. i want to help but im only partially a developper. i can start with some admin stuff to help structure the workload to begin with and maybe learn and contribute some code.
id like to see if theres others that share the same remarks and maybe justify more efforts on the subject?

[geniusled]

TLDR

• Good music playback with split-screen and steering controls.
• Artist search limited and incomplete.
• Playback desync between phone and AA apps.
• Only music available; no movies/shows.
• Sparse documentation for AA/Jellyfin Android integration.

[nielsvanvelzen]

Android Auto support is currently being rewritten entirely so things will change in the next release of the app. Unfortunately Android Auto is very limited in what is allows. For example, it does not support pagination at all. This is an issue for Jellyfin as some users have libraries with ten thousand music albums, requesting all of those at once from the server and then sending them all at once to Android Auto can cause all kinds of issues (large bandwidth use / bad performance / overloading server etc.).
So we have to be creative to work within the capabilities Android Auto offers.

The rewrite will add support for audiobooks in addition to music though. No video support is planned.

[nielsvanvelzen]

"our documentation" as in, the Jellyfin documentation overall. For the documentation questions I think @BotBlake can help out here 👍.

[BotBlake]

Hi there @geniusled

If a client has notable differences from others, those should absolutely be documented clearly. The key is to keep each client guide focused on its unique aspects, without duplicating topics already covered elsewhere (for instance, we already have detailed documentation on networking and connectivity issues).

I think the proposed location for the new page under the Clients section is a good choice. The Clients folder is specifically intended for client-specific guides, and this documentation clearly fits that purpose.

That said, I would advise against publishing a detailed feature list in the Jellyfin.org documentation. Client features can change rapidly, and maintaining such lists would require continuous updates from the documentation team. Instead, a base feature overview could be more sustainable — for example, noting support for things like Android Auto or SyncPlay. These fundamental capabilities are unlikely to be removed once implemented and give users a stable understanding of what the client supports.

I could also see it being useful to include an overview of experimental features and a brief explanation of what the client settings do. That kind of information helps users understand the app better.

I strongly recommend keeping a pull request open — perhaps as a draft — so that the documentation team can review and discuss the changes with you. This way, we can reach a clear consensus about what belongs in a client guide and what doesn’t, ensuring consistency across the documentation as a whole. If you’d like to coordinate more directly, you’re also welcome to join our documentation chat. https://jellyfin.org/contact

Kind regards.

[geniusled]

I agree, the app is mainly the webui with small differences. At this time i have focused on setup/ clients settings.
I also agree with the basic feature list, i dont want to create something that adds more work to maintain. Ill focus on mentioning stable features that might be client specific (build flavors,multi-server support,video players,cast support(only proprietary), downloading) then later after discussing with you all more in depth for AA.
Currently im info dumping into a draft, ill get the formatting into a better state and start a pull request when the structure is made.

Ill also start looking into the matrix discussions soon, im not familiar with that platform.

[geniusled]

ive opened a fork and created a PR on jellyfin.org please take a look and provide some feedback, im available to make some changes if necessary