When driving, you need to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. At the very least, keep your eyes and hands off your phone, since that is one of the biggest distractions you can have when driving. Thankfully, Android Auto manages to provide a lot of your phone’s essential functionality directly in your car, hands-free.
Android Auto 12.5 is now here, and even though it doesn’t come with any major changes that we can see, it brings better performance and fewer bugs, and you can download it right away. Plus, its launch coincides nicely with a convenient new feature in Maps and Waze.
Android Auto 12.5 Is Here To Improve The General Experience
Android Auto 12.5 is finally here, marking the halfway point towards reaching Android Auto 13, which should most likely come with some significant upgrades. If you’re reading between the lines, you should be able to tell that means Android Auto 12.5 is coming without any significant upgrades. If you were hoping for UI changes or obvious new features, you’re unfortunately not going to get that here.
As usual, this is one of those updates where the official changelog merely speaks of “bug fixes and other improvements”. That’s not bad, because it means that the app is less likely to crash or perform unexpectedly, so it should be more reliable in your daily use. There are also likely to be some performance improvements to get certain parts of the application running smoother.
Anyway, as long as it makes the app work better, I don’t think any of us can complain. You can get this new version of Android Auto on your smartphone right away by updating it from its Google Play Store link.
However, in case you’re not seeing the latest version on the Play Store, you can try to download the APK instead, from a source like APKMirror, and update using that instead.
Incident Reporting In Waze And Google Maps Makes It Easier For You To Mark Road Hazards
Well, while there’s no major change in the Android Auto application to get you all hot and bothered, there is something slightly related to that. If you use Waze or Google Maps for navigation on Android Auto, you’re now going to find it a lot easier to report incidents or hazards that you encounter while on the road.
Let’s say that you’re driving and you encounter a slowdown, a crash, a construction site, or some other kind of unusual event on the road that might impact traffic. You’ll now be able to very easily report this from Android Auto and even on your device itself. This will help other users on the road by providing real-time updates that Google doesn’t have the capacity to dynamically provide.
The best part is that incidents reported on Waze will also show up for Google Maps users (and I assume the reverse is the case as well). It will simply make your travel a lot easier when you know everything beforehand.
