Changelog

GTA VI closer to the game, map on the instrument cluster

GTA VI matched more closely to Rockstar's footage, the map on the car's instrument cluster, and a traffic fix from real drives in a Tata Curvv. Covers 0.5.4 and 0.5.5.

New

• Instrument cluster. Cars whose dials have a map view (the Tata Curvv has one) can now show Overworld there: the themed map, the route and the arrow, while the car prints the next turn and the time itself. It's new and only tried on a few setups, so tell us in an issue whether your car shows it.
• GTA VI turn card laid out like the game's: the move in words ("Turn Right", "Off-Ramp Right") over the distance, the arrow on a pink square.
• GTA VI minimap edges: the "N" slides round the map's border, and when the destination is off the map its pink dot waits on the border in its direction (car screen and phone).
• GTA VI by time of day: buildings at their real heights (no height cap), speed cameras as the game's CCTV marker, golden-hour highways with lanes between pale stripes, deep teal parks at night, and stacked flyover ramps that stand apart on dark edges at night.

Fixes

• Traffic on the route now starts exactly at the arrow. A red jam used to carry on up to 25 m behind the car, and on GTA V the purple route showed down both sides of it.

music, phone locked, car buttons

Fixes from real drives in a Tata Curvv. Covers 0.5.2 and 0.5.3.

Fixes

• Music no longer stays quiet for the whole trip. With voice guidance off, the navigation library still asked Android to turn other audio down before every turn prompt, then never gave it back because nothing was spoken.
• The app no longer stops with the phone locked. Samsung's app freezer could pause it mid-drive (GPS and traffic stopped until the phone was unlocked). The first launch now asks to let it run in the background, and Settings > Phone locked shows whether it's set.
• Car screen: the zoom and sound buttons stay hidden while you drive, like Google Maps. A tap, drag or pinch brings them up for about 10 seconds. They used to stay on whenever the car was under 8 km/h, which in city traffic was most of the time.
• Split screen: the "Where to?" card and the other HUD cards keep clear of the map window's rounded corner.

Google routes, steady GPS, game-style car buttons

The first release with an APK to download. Covers 0.5.0 and 0.5.1.

Driving

• Trips follow Google Maps' own route and traffic, laid onto the game map (one switch in Settings goes back to open data only). Search finds places only Google lists.
• Steady GPS: at a red light the marker stays put, under a flyover it carries on along the road, and a real wrong turn reroutes within seconds while a single stray fix never does.
• A camera per game (steep GTA VI, gentle GTA V, flat Red Dead) with Google-style zoom: out on fast roads, framing the next turn from about a kilometre away, flatter as the turn comes up.
• The arrow sits where the car is now, low on the screen, and stops swinging on straight roads.
• "Location not found" when GPS is gone, and the speed hides instead of showing an old one.

Car screen

• Sound, zoom and route buttons drawn in each game's style, in place of Android Auto's grey ones. They come and go with Android Auto's own buttons.
• Drag or pinch the map on a trip, and a re-centre button stays until you tap it.
• The HUD fits every head unit size and the map's half of split screen, and taps land on the right button there too. Switching layouts glides.
• + Cam (mark a speed camera) is now off unless turned on in Settings, and shows only after a touch.

Map

• Flyovers stand above the roads they cross, with a shadow, and the route runs over or under them like the games' minimaps.
• GTA VI: shaded buildings, cleaner glass panels.

Phone

• Landscape layout, and the arrow stays clear of the trip sheet.

fixes

• Directions: closing a place (or picking another) while its route was loading no longer pops up a preview of it a moment later, and a double tap asks for the route once.
• Search: the list no longer blanks to "No places found" while you type, and a search server that hangs now costs 3.5 s instead of up to 20 s.
• The trip notification's Stop only answers this app's own notification; before, any app (or the other build of this app) could end a trip. Its distances are always in km.
• Long trips: live incidents now cover the road ahead, not just the first 100 km or so of the route.
• Car screen with no trip: the HUD no longer flips between the speedometer and "Where to?" in slow traffic; "Where to?" comes back after 20 s standing still.
• Phone: the trip bar no longer empties after a reroute, and a dropped pin is no longer tagged Home just because Home was saved from one.

GTA VI

• GTA VI, a third world: a pink route with a brighter edge that stays the same day and night, 3D buildings with a light that follows the view, lane dashes, and a map that follows the sun (day, dusk, night) or stays on the one you pick in Settings. Sheets on the phone float with rounded corners, set in Inter and Barlow Condensed.
• Hand-made player blips for all three worlds, drawn without stretching. Arrows, waypoints and road icons are smaller, close to the games' own sizes next to the route.
• Car screen: the live speed sits above the left card in every world and turns red over the limit, with the limit sign beside it.
• A cleaner scale bar in the map corner.
• Settings in four groups (Map, Driving, Places, About). Clearing saved places or marked cameras needs a second tap. 3D buildings can be turned off.

• Smoother map on a trip: the route, traffic, lights and cameras were sent to MapLibre again on every animation frame, and the phone screen and car HUD redrew every frame. Now only the arrow and the start of the route move each frame, and the route starts exactly under the arrow.
• Search finds areas: typing an area's name puts the area first (Chattarpur from Gurgaon used to list shops and the metro station before it). Indian spellings match each other (Chhatarpur, Chattarpur), nearer places come first, and answers are cached.
• Nearby along the route: on a trip, places on the way come first with their detour ("On the way", "+3 min"). Nearby is in the car's strip during a trip, and a pick becomes a stop before the destination.
• Time to go: fixed a failed traffic refresh showing the whole trip's time for the rest of it; routes start from the newest GPS fix.
• A small drive log on the phone for checking a drive afterwards.

camera chime on

• Camera chime, on by default. Two quick rising notes as a speed camera comes within 500 m, on a trip or just driving. It plays on the navigation channel, so Android Auto handles it like a turn prompt: through the car speakers, music turned down for a moment, and not silenced when the phone is on vibrate. Voice guidance stays separate and off. Switching the chime on in Settings plays it once.
• A camera chimes once, then again only after it's a kilometre behind you (the drive back).
• Free-drive camera alerts work even when GPS gives no direction, using the way the last fixes moved.

free drive, search in the car, places from Google Maps

Everything here comes from the first drive in a real car (a Tata Curvv on Android Auto).

Free drive

• With no trip running, the car map follows you heading-up and glides between GPS fixes, like Google Maps. Before, it pointed north, jumped every 3 seconds, and stopped following for good once touched. On the same simulated drive the map now moves every tenth of a second.
• Recenter and zoom buttons on the car map, and your speed with camera alerts while driving without a trip.

Finding places

• Search and Nearby on the car screen: Android Auto's search (keyboard while parked) and one tap for petrol and CNG, food, parking, toilets, hospitals and hotels, closest first.
• Indian results first, with TomTom's business listings alongside OpenStreetMap. Places abroad only fill a short list.
• Plus codes from any Google Maps page (F5QR+3F New Delhi) and typed coordinates go straight to the spot.
• A place only Google lists can be shared in: Google Maps > Share > Overworld.

Cameras

• Every kind of enforcement camera OpenStreetMap has, not just those tagged as speed cameras (in the Delhi NCR core that's about 49 instead of 9).
• + Cam on the car screen (and "Mark a camera here" on the phone) saves cameras you pass, for alerts on any route and in free drive.
• An optional camera beep in Settings.

Also

• The arrival time eases into new estimates instead of jumping when live traffic refreshes.
• Rerouting tested on a real (not simulated) trip driven off the route on purpose.

fixes from a bug hunt before the first real drive

A pass through the whole app looking for crashes like v0.2.1's before the first drive in a real car. Each fix below was checked on the Desktop Head Unit or in a test.

Fixed

• Asking for a destination in the car no longer closes the app. A navigation request from Android Auto ("navigate to …", or an address tapped in a message) crashed the car app, because Ferrostar's link parser throws on every geo: link. Overworld now reads the link itself, by place name or coordinates, and follows requests that arrive while a trip is running (they used to be ignored).
• Ending a trip the moment it starts no longer crashes the app. Android kills an app whose location service stops before it has fully started; the stop now waits for it.
• Voice prompts in the car keep working after you close the phone app. Closing it shut down the voice engine the car shares.
• The last trip's traffic lights and incidents clear off the map when it ends, and its live traffic stops being re-fetched from TomTom every 2½ minutes in the background.
• End trip always ends. A GPS update landing at the same moment could bring the trip back.
• A real trip after a test drive can't be driven by the simulator. Stopping a test drive from the notification left the simulator on.
• Guards for the real car's screen: a screen surface with no size, or a free area reported past the screen's edge, is handled instead of closing the app. Roundabout exit number 0, which Android Auto rejects, counts as unknown.
• Route errors say when there's no drivable road to a place, instead of blaming the connection.

Added

• Tests that run on a phone or emulator: real Delhi and Chandigarh routes pushed through Android Auto step by step (64 of their 65 roundabout steps would have closed v0.2.0), navigation links in every form, trips stopped as they start, and the car screen.
• Debug commands: drive to a place by name (--es query), a real trip on GPS (--ez test false), and DEBUG_STATE to log what the app holds.

no more crashes at roundabouts in the car

A fix for Android Auto, found while testing v0.2.0 on the car screen.

Fixed

• The app no longer crashes in the car at roundabouts. A route that starts on a roundabout (a trip started there, or a reroute after a missed exit) made Android Auto reject a turn instruction, and the whole app closed. Every route, reroutes included, is now checked before Android Auto sees it.

Added

• Debug test drives can start anywhere: add --ef from_lat <lat> --ef from_lng <lng> to the test-drive command (see the README).

GTA V and Red Dead 2 on Android Auto

The first public version: two game worlds on real roads, built for the Android Auto screen first.

Worlds

• GTA V: the pause map, the game's shop blips, a waypoint-purple route, GTA menus and HUD.
• Red Dead 2: parchment and ink, pencil place names, a red route, Red Dead menus and HUD.

On Android Auto

• The game HUD owns the left of the screen and Android Auto keeps the right: turn card with "Then" and road alerts, time card, speedometer with the speed-limit sign, street name.
• A themed route preview with Start and Cancel.
• The road already driven disappears behind the marker, like the games' radar.

Road info

• Traffic on your route only, like Google's route line (TomTom, optional free key). Traffic on every road is a switch in Layers.
• Traffic lights on the route, speed cameras ahead, incidents along the route, and the time traffic adds.
• Speed-limit signs for each world, turning red at 5 km/h over.

Fixed in this version

• Turn arrows no longer go blank at roundabouts, and roundabouts and U-turns are drawn for left-hand traffic.