- Google announced that music apps on Android Auto will receive big design updates
- Developers will have more flexibility when designing their app experiences across dashboards with Android Auto.
- Improvements include more content design templates, better visual headers, and smoother navigation features.
The experience of listening to your favorite songs in your car could soon be transformed, as Google will give Android Auto app developers more flexibility when designing their apps to improve layouts and enable easier navigation.
Last week, Google announced a major AI-powered update to Android Auto. The Android Auto 17.0 beta is now available, and at its I/O 2026 developer event, Google teased some of the changes coming this year, including revamping several of the most popular music apps, including Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Gaana, PocketFM, and TuneIn.
An update to the car app library will give app developers more options for how they want navigation and content playback to appear on Android Auto. Until now, developers have faced restrictions on layout designs due to security concerns, and this update gives developers more freedom to design their apps to deliver minimally distracting experiences on different types of dashboards that support Android Auto.
The company will increase the adaptability of templates to give developers more content layout options, including new headers to improve visual elements, as well as “featured sections that can be placed in scrollable areas to highlight specific content and variations of grid elements to support different types and states of content.”
Google details the changes in more detail in a post on its developer blog, adding that it will also “introduce new components and template capabilities to help developers create even more engaging experiences.”
“For multimedia applications, we are introducing an adaptive mini-player, so users can navigate while easily managing playback,” the post says, adding “Finally, we are adding more component types, including Chip and CondensedItem, to increase the ways content can be displayed and interacted with.”
Some developers have already started using Android Auto’s new design options to revamp their car app experiences, and Google is inviting more developers to join its early access beta program and start using the new Car Library app templates.
