The major Android Auto overhaul that was announced in mid-2019 came not only with a plethora of new features, but also with changes that not everybody liked.
One of them was the removal of calendar information, which was displayed on the home screen alongside the weather widget.
The modern Android Auto experience thus no longer comes with any visual information regarding an appointment that’s set in the Google Calendar app, but instead relies on Google Assistant for the whole thing. So if you want to stay up-to-date with your agenda, just ask the Assistant and it’ll let you know of any appointments for the day.
It goes without saying this isn’t the most convenient approach, and Google knows this better than users.
So the company has been hard at work on undoing some of these changes, and after bringing a weather icon to the status bar to replace the original widget, the company is now preparing to reintroduce the calendar in Android Auto too.
9to5Google has discovered code in the latest Android Auto version that indicates the Calendar integration is on its way.
A reference found during an APK teardown indicates that Android Auto will invite users to “try the new Calendar app to view, navigate to, and call numbers in your events.” So the chances are that Android Auto won’t just display upcoming calendar appointment but offer more advanced integration to navigate to the appointment locations defined in the app and even call a contact mentioned in each entry from the Android Auto interface.
The wording used for this new feature seems to suggest that this is something that’s coming to the Google Calendar app and not to Android Auto itself. For the time being, however, the integration doesn’t seem to be ready, so I’m guessing that Google is still conducting a series of tests before enabling this new feature with a server-side switch for the first wave of users in a future update.
