replacing my infotainment system

April 18, 2024

short answer: no, get a phone mount.
this isn't more a guide, but rather my thoughts, since i am the one who replaced my car infotainment system with a $200 one from amazon. this is funny, because i am probably the furthest from the market to buy one. i drive like 2 miles a day (only because my parents make me) and already have an aux port. but i thought it would be funny to take snapchat pictures with my backup camera, so i spent money.

installing it

so every model and car is different, but installing was both easier and harder than i thought it would be. taking the already existing car radio out was easy actually, it just required a little strength. i forced my friend to help me, his car blew up so i have to drive him home. lol. plugging the new one in was kinda easy but also not. it was mainly a big game of guess what part goes where. its not too hard, because if a piece doesn't fit, than it's obviously not correct.
installing the usb cables was kinda a pain. i found out my car had a spot to store dvd, and im never going to use that, so i removed it and put the usb cables in it instead. its right by the cup holders, which is good because its by my phone, and in a spot susceptible to spills. awesome!
also, while removing this part, me and my friend found 2 subway gift cards from 2009 that still had a balance on them. that was awesome.
what's cool is that this one doesn't require any screws, so if i need to fiddle with things (which i will definitely need to do), i can just rip it out. i also hope this means it will fly into my face in case i crash on my 25 mph street.

integration

the device was actually integrated into my car much better than i thought it would be. first off, it displays a warning when a door is open, which i didn't even know my car could do. from what i heard, getting the volume buttons and channel buttons on the back of the steering wheel to work with it would take a bit of fiddling, but they just worked out of the box. there is a noticable delay when switching tracks, and the volume starts muted. instead of a volume knob, you have to use touch volume buttons, which i dont like, but you can change the color of them, so whatever. the only thing i haven't been able to get to work so far is the backup camera. this is kinda annoying because i am awful at driving, so having it would be really nice. but, hey, i haven't messed with stuff much yet.

software

okay, let's turn it on. like everything ever made, it runs android. so that's fun. ive found sometimes it boots fast, and other times its really slow to boot. sometimes it takes 5 seconds, sometimes it takes 40. eh, i'll go into changes i will make later.
i got the 2 GB of RAM model, which i think would be enough, but i guess not in its current state. for comparison, my iphone has 4 GB of RAM, and it's like 2 models from no longer getting software updates (it's an iphone 11). i knew it would be slow. but i wasn't that worried, because the apple tv i have basically has the specs of an iphone 6 (the tv has 2 GB of RAM), and that runs really fast because its not doing much.
well, the apple tv is a device where a lot of time and effort went into the operating system in order to make it work well as a TV device. this car radio is literally just an android phone but put into a car. it's slow, especially when using google maps or carplay (carplay is slightly faster). also, speaking of carplay...

carplay

the main reason to install an aftermarket radio (i've changed what i call the device like 4 times in this blogpost) is carplay / android auto. with this, carplay works over bluetooth. and that would be cool, if bluetooth didn't suck! i cannot get it to work over a wired connection (you can tell because if you're using a wired connection, it won't display your battery in carplay). the latency is awful (which isn't a dealbreaker because im not using my car while driving), but the audio is horrible. you know when your coworker who has aux goes to vape and the speaker starts bugging out as they get out of range? imagine having to drive to that, but less worse.

plsfix

i think one way that i can speed up this device is removing bloat. it has so much. there's this weird radar app, like 6 gps apps, airplay support app (who is airplaying in thier car?), devtools (including a boot animation changer, which i am definitely going to make as awful as i can), a third party app store with a silly name, themes, and much more junk. the file manager also has a test video, which is a 6 minute film of a prediction of the future.
so, this is a list of changes i am planning on making:

conclusion

in conclusion, this is just a to-do list for me, disguised as a blog post.