My car’s android unit has some quad core processor , and it instantly boots up and reaches the home screen where as my phone takes almost 30 seconds or a minute to reach the home screen despite having much better hardware.
One reason may be that they’re not actually off when the ignition is off, they’re just asleep like your phone is when the screen is off but it’s still powered on.
That’s exactly it.
The unit does restart about once every week and then goes back to suspend to ram.
You basically will never notice the restart unless you cut off power. And additionally drain all capacitors.
Yeah, I recall the one time I actually saw my head unit restart, it took a minute to boot up.
Among the other things that have been said, Android auto often makes use of some tricks too. Things like hibernation that phones typically do not do (Probably the biggest one right here), Animations to hide loading time, loading some critical, but not latency sensitive services until after the boot. and some other misc service management stuff.
I think the phone just has to do more stuff
Yeah my S23 takes way too long to start up for being the newest tech. It’s stupid.
Lol I too have a Samsung phone…That’s why this question came up in my mind the first place.
The OS offers fewer services. That means developing for Android Auto is more work, some app features simply don’t work, and maintainance is even worse than on normal Android. Who needs Doze power saving when you’ve got a few dozen liters of fuel in the back? The stuff that it doesn’t do can sometimes be done by a connected phone instead, which also saves the CPU of the head unit some cycles.
Plus, the OS can be designed for fast boot. Android generally isn’t. How often do you even reboot your phone? The important part is that once it’s running, it doesn’t suck down too much power. It doesn’t really matter if it takes 30 seconds to boot because that’s 30 seconds every month. A car needs to start and be ready to use in seconds.
The infotainment screen also contains a lot of stuff that it doesn’t need to load anything for because it’s handled by another CPU running elsewhere in the car. Your infotainment system isn’t usually controlling your speedometer, window wipers, or AC, it just provides a button that sends a network packet to a bunch of other computers that take care of the featurea for you. Turning on your car actually turns on a dozen of tiny computers.
Also, your infotainment system isn’t hooked up to a 3000mAh battery. It can suck down voltage like crazy compared to phones or tablets. Outfit a mobile CPU from a few years ago with a heat sink and disable power savings and that thing will suddenly become tolerable.
Lastly, not every head unit is that fast. I’ve been in cars that took full minutes to get to a state where navigation would allow input. Android Auto and Carplay units may be slow, but they’re lightning fast compared to what car manufacturers would put in their cars if it weren’t for Big Tech’s hardware requirements.
Android Auto or Android Automotive?
The former is basically just a screen your phone is casting to. The latter is a lightweight (stripped down) Android fork designed to boot very quickly and do a couple things very well. It probably never really “turns off” since it still has a 12v connection even when the car is off (why your clock doesn’t reset).
Android on your phone is a much more general purpose operating system that runs on a (much more limited) battery. It isn’t designed to be turned on and off frequently.
They don’t have as much background software recording everything and phoning home.
Give it time, and they may get there.
Source: I’m just bullshitting. I don’t know jack shit about what runs on a new car. I don’t buy new cars.
But my DeGoogled phone boots really fast, so I might still be right, unfortunately.
They don’t have as much background software recording everything and phoning home.
In fact, in some ways they’re worse. At least you can pull the SIM card out of your phone without power tools.
Basically, that kind of is it.
They have less background services overall as well as less hardware to initialise. Probably some other differences as well.
I’m not super familiar with Android Auto, but have worked with other embedded systems that are based on customized OSs. They typically run the bare minimum subset of features to do what they’re designed to do.
It’s also possible they don’t boot every time but just kind of hibernate.
I would bet they have their own battery and use that while the car is off
Hmm. Maybe. Or at least an internal battery to keep it in “sleep/powersave” without draining the car’s battery.
Now I want to tear one down to find out 😆
There has been a lot of work done in the unix universe to reduce boot times: https://www.e-consystems.com/articles/Product-Design/Linux-Boot-Time-Optimization-Techniques.asp
A lot of it has to do with deferring services not needed immediately till later. The same could be done for Android.
A phone uses a rechargeable battery.
The car uses a supercharged 5.0 liter Dual OverHead Camshaft 8-cylinder engine running on 93 Octane.
Which one has more power, oorrgh??
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1 upvote = more power, Al
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1 downvote = more I don’t think so, Tim
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