In some states you no longer can interact with a phone at all unless mounted. Phone mounts kind of suck or you’ll be in a rental without your nice mount. A 15” screen is easier to read than a small phone bouncing on a mount.

If I’m spending $10K on something, I want the Android/iOS experience to be first-class instead of some shitty UI designed be people who I presume don’t drive cars.

Cars are otherwise fungible between brands. If one has CarPlay/Android Auto there is little reason to pick a brand that lacks support.

I'm one of the people that wouldn't buy a card without android auto and carplay support

Car UIs are just universally awful. Even if somehow you find one with a decent UI, it will never get updated and within 5 years it will suck

I use Android and having Android Auto is absolutely a must have for me.

AUX cord? It's been a few years since I've seen a phone with a headphone jack, or a car with an AUX input. I also don't miss the time where my phone had to be connected on one side to USB for charging, on the other side to the sounds system, and my navigation was done using a a 6" screen that kept falling between the chairs. Android Auto/CarPlay let's you connect one thing (or not at all), have your phone charged, your navigation clear, and your music playing smoothly and controlled with the physical car knobs.

> when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone

This is on Google Maps. Nothing about Auto/CarPlay prevents this. Google just chose to do this.

> Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it?

It just works and it is, like others before me said, consistent. I can connect my iPhone to any car I drive that has CatPlay and the dashboard looks like I like it. And Spotify starts right from where it left off in the other car.

Can't speak for the Android experience.

CarPlay is better than android auto in that it works with my iPhone; as to why it is currently in _my_ requirements, it’s simple: I rent cars when I travel, I’m too lazy to memorise so many maps, and I don’t have a good mount I can bring with me.

That being said I think there are a few things that make my carplay experience _worse_ than my friends’ android auto experience: for example today I am annoyed by google maps spam me with notifications trying to get me to use googles maps instead of waze which is so fucking stupid since it’s also google and it just makes me more annoyed with google instead of being the sort of thing that would convince me to switch to android. But I have to admit the google maps and waze integration on android is better.