A Skoda, a VW, an Audi and a Bolt all dropped the phone's Bluetooth audio once Android Auto was
up. If Bluetooth audio to the car was connected when it showed Gearslip and drops after, that
car's music goes through Gearslip from then on, remembered per car, and the car screen says so.
Picking Bluetooth by hand clears what was learned. When capture stays silent while Spotify
plays, the car screen says Spotify doesn't let its sound be passed on.
Gearslip took an Audi's virtual cockpit and showed black there with nothing to navigate,
instead of the car's own map (#56). It now asks for the cluster when a route starts and hands
it back once there has been none for 10 seconds.
A Bolt opened the TCP connection but never sent its first message, then sent a new
StartRequest over Bluetooth. Gearslip kept waiting on the dead connection for 88 seconds. Now a
repeat StartRequest while the session still waits for the car opens a fresh connection. A
session already under way is left alone.
The Bolt in #18 stayed connected only once Gearslip passed it the phone's Bluetooth address,
which was hidden in Settings. After a paired car connects without it, Home asks once per car
and opens About phone. Coming back, Gearslip offers the address it finds on the clipboard. The
car screen says once to finish a step on the phone when parked.
The screenshot of Vela navigating comes first, then one warning and a short table. Install
steps, the GrapheneOS note and the download check sit together, and the longer notes move
lower.
As in Android Auto, turning zooms the map, nudging pans it, and pressing brings up its buttons
for the knob to move between; Back puts them away. A card over the map with buttons of its own
keeps the knob. On the Apps screen the first knob move lands on the app opened last. Issue #74:
a Mazda 3 driver had to turn through every button to get anywhere.
The 2021 Bolt still hangs up about 20 seconds in with pings answered and GM's channel open.
These are the two channels it offers that Gearslip had never opened. What arrives on them is
logged. Without an address typed in Settings, no PairingRequest is sent.
Deezer sometimes carried on out of the phone's speaker after the car was turned off. Apps that
are buffering are paused too, and two seconds later any that started by themselves are paused
again.
The 2017 Pilot (protocol 1.0) never answered the request for its screen, even once the media
channel was open. The deprecated display field is what the 2018 Uconnect needed to give its
screen back, so the retry sends it too. The retry now also runs on cars with no media channel.
Metrolist swaps ic_heart_outline for ic_heart and keeps the name, so only the heart filled
in. A plain icon that has an outline twin in the app now counts as on.
A VW MIB2 drops an already paired phone's Bluetooth when Gearslip
connects over USB, because nothing tells it the two are the same phone
(#28). Android Auto says so on the car's Bluetooth channel with the
phone's address, which Android hides from apps. Settings now takes the
address typed in by hand; with it, Gearslip opens that channel on every
connection to a paired car and sends the address. Without it, nothing
changes.
A 2025 Nissan's Bosch unit drops the link a second after every turn
on its directions channel while its music channel is open, and it
plays music through nothing else (#35). A new car setting, off by
default, leaves the directions channel alone: each turn is mixed into
the music with the music turned down under it, or, when nothing is
playing, goes out on the music channel on its own under ducking focus.
Either side of the link may ping, and a real phone does. A 2021 Bolt
hangs up 25 seconds into every drive even with its own pings answered
and GM's channel open (#18), which leaves the phone's pings as the one
thing Android Auto sends that Gearslip didn't.
A surface encoder only makes a frame when the screen changes, and the
repeat-last-frame setting should cover a still one. On a Pixel 10 it
didn't: a LuChi box got 11 frames, then nothing, and stayed black
(#58). When the encoder has been quiet for a second, Gearslip now
draws its screen again, which is a new frame for the car.
Turned on under Settings > Connection, Gearslip's car screen fills the device's own
display as its home app. An All apps page opens any other app full screen, Back and
a head unit's keys work the car UI, and Phone hides on devices that can't call.
Phones never see Gearslip offered as a home app unless it's switched on.
From the moment the car's Bluetooth channel opens until the drive ends, a quiet
notification keeps Gearslip in the foreground, so Android lets it join the car's
Wi-Fi with the phone locked.
Neither runs on the car screen, but while one guides on the phone, Gearslip reads
its turn notification and shows the arrow, distance and road in the nav bar, and
sends the turn to the instrument cluster.
While Gearslip waits for the car to call, it also calls the car's own service every
8 seconds, for cars that publish it late. If the Bluetooth channel closes, the Wi-Fi
join fails or TCP can't reach the car before its screen comes up, the start-up
begins again, up to three times.
A certificate the car calls not valid yet or expired, but that is fine by the
phone's clock, now says to set the car's date and time. A start that hasn't
reached the car's screen after 45 seconds says what to try, for cable and wireless.
Android only lets the location service start in the seconds after Gearslip's
screen opens. Gearslip now starts it as the car connects, instead of when a map
opens later with the phone already in a pocket.
Native crashes, freezes and the memory killer leave no stack trace in the log. On
the next launch, Gearslip writes the reason Android recorded, at the end of the run
that died and in the new one.
When the car took the speakers for a moment, for a call or its own voice, Gearslip
paused the music and gave up its claim, so the car never handed the sound back.
It now keeps the claim and plays the music again once the car is done.
Waze asks whether a reported hazard is still there with an alert, and
Gearslip dropped every one (#54). An alert now shows as a card across
the top of any screen, with its buttons and a bar for the time left.
The car opens Gearslip on the phone each time it connects, over USB or
through auto-connect. Once video is up it now moves to the background,
unless the phone was already showing it or a question needs the driver.
Older head units (2017 Pilot, 2020 Civic, 2024 Mirage) never show our
screen while the media channel is closed, which it is when music goes
over Bluetooth. If the screen hasn't come 5 seconds after asking, open
the channel and ask again.
Translation Memory had filled in wrong near-matches (French and Spanish Bluetooth off became
on, German Directions on became off), so every language keeps the repo's wording. Only the
new, empty Danish file comes in.
Weblate's branch had machine translations that overwrote better ones, so the repo's
text wins. German and Spanish get the four strings they were missing, written by
hand, and German's Certificate setting is called Zertifikat like everywhere else.
French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish,
Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified) and Arabic. They are early drafts for native speakers to
fix on Weblate. The README also catches up on the audio option, now called Through Gearslip,
and on cars that need your own certificate.
Seb3thehacker