Going wireless is the norm; efficient or not, it is ergonomic, clutter free and easy. Easy, is it? Well in most cases, but it is not easy to find a option to go wireless when it comes to Android Auto(AA). Most car manufacturers, even in their top end offerings, do not provide wireless AA. You have to use wire to connect or some sort of dongle required. Though it is not fully wireless option as the dongle would connect with a wire to your infotainment system, but it remove the hassle of connecting/disconnecting wire to your phone every time you get into the car.
As most users do not care if it is wired or wireless, not enough solution to make a wired AA to wireless AA available in market. Some Chinese dongles present, but they are not even 1% reliable. First reliable option came from crowd funded Indiegogo project AAWireless back in 2020. Second option came sometime last year from
Motorola (Motorola MA1 dongle offers wireless Android Auto capabilities), but soon the short fall of it started coming in online forums. And it is not easy to get hold of, specially in India.
Now AAWireless being crowd funded, manufacturing depends on bulk order and this pandemic makes the delivery of the product not streamlined and only ships in batches. But user base is strong, online support is available and they ship to India. However, once you get hold of one, it has many variables for it to work, I'll get to details of this.
Ordered it in January with a March expected delivery. Though product owners update the progress, there are delays not in their control and finally got it delivered 3rd week of April. Note that, seller send the device all duty paid shipping to India, but Indian counterpart of the courier company would try to charge you customs duty. You just have to ignore that and send a mail or raise a ticket at
https://cpeb.freshdesk.com/support/home, they take care of it.
The device
The device comes in a small box, back of it has the QR code to download the companion android application.
![AAWireless - Indiegogo project for wireless Android Auto dongle-20220423_155624.jpg](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/car-entertainment/2299771d1686859028t-aawireless-indiegogo-project-wireless-android-auto-dongle-20220423_155624.jpg)
Download the app, if you are lucky, it has only 4 steps and one pre-requisite (app will guide you). I will give the steps along with some points to make it work (possibly, it worked for my 2020 Seltos GTX+ and Samsung S21)
Prerequisite
Before you do anything, go to your phone setting, search for advanced option of AA and enable developer option if already not enabled. Now from top right menu developer settings, enable "Add wireless projection to settings".
Make sure "wireless android auto" is also enabled.
Steps to connect
1. Start the car
2. Connect to device using supplied USB cable to car's AA USB port
3. It would search for AAWireless device - this time, if your car Bluetooth is already connected, disconnect from your phone Bluetooth menu. In search screen on AAWireless app, select AAWireless device from the list. It will connect to AAWireless device and it may ask you to give some permissions. Allow them.
4. It will launch the app in normal mode on mobile and the device would try to connect to car's AA with all default settings.
If you are lucky, your infotainment system would show AA. But some of the troubleshooting might require from the first try only. For me two settings needed to be done for it to work.
Settings
App interface is clean, but not much details on what options do what
For my case, I had to set following things for it to work. From AAWireless app, go to settings -
1. Set USB mode to MTP (from Default)
2. Set Passthrough to Enabled
Voila, infotainment system shows AA, as it used to.
After this first setup and troubleshooting, once connected, it is straight forward there after. If your WiFi and Bluetooth are always enabled on phone, it would auto connect as soon as you switch on the car. And it takes around 15 second for AA to be connected to car infotainment. Tested with Google Maps and Amazon Music, both worked flawlessly for limited time I used it. So far, no lag detected. Yet to fully use it for longer time, will keep this thread updated.
And all AAWireless users can discuss the issues, troubleshooting and solutions in this thread.