Android Auto is on the verge of a major change that will affect hundreds of thousands of owners of older smartphones around the world. Users using mobile devices with the Android 10 operating system have begun to receive official system warnings on the screens of their car multimedia systems that support for their device will soon be discontinued.
The appearance of these messages suggests that the technology giant Google is preparing to raise the minimum operating system requirement to Android 11 for both wired and wireless connections to the car. Although an official statement from the company is still missing, such a move is a completely logical step in the quest to optimize security, introduce new functionalities such as the long-awaited media updates and integration with advanced artificial intelligences such as Gemini.
For now, owners of the affected models are faced with a dilemma - to check whether their phone is eligible for a software upgrade to a newer version of Android or to invest in a new mobile device in the near future if they want to maintain seamless access to navigation, calls and multimedia directly through their car's dashboard.