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Video: Android Auto on Pioneer receivers

Flawless integration of your Android phone with a Pioneer stereo

Heads up!

Welcome to this article from the Crutchfield archives. Have fun reading it, but be aware that the information may be outdated and links may be broken.

Editor's note: the stereos discussed in this video are no longer available, but the video is still a great example of how Android Auto works with newer Pioneer stereos. 

Android Auto takes the most important apps from your Android phone and ports them to your Pioneer in-dash touchscreen. Once the app is running, you can stash your phone and use voice commands to navigate, send messages, listen to music, and more. In this video, Harry from Pioneer takes us through a comprehensive demo of Android Auto and explains which Pioneer receivers work with it.

Read video transcript

Cory: We do a lot of trainings here at Crutchfield. Today we're here with Pioneer. Harry is here showing us some brand new head units. There's a ton of them all set up here so we can get our hands on some units that have Android on them.

Harry: Yeah, we're gonna show you how Android Auto works with Pioneer's new NEX head units. It works with three different models. That's the AVH-4100NEX, the AVIC-7100NEX, and the AVIC-8100NEX. They all work with Apple CarPlay, and they work with Android Auto.

All right the first thing we'll do is we're gonna plug in our phone. This phone is a Nexus 5. There are a number of different phones that will work, but your phone has to be an Android phone running version 5 of Android. Now the phone's kind of locked out at this point, so we don't really need the phone anymore.

Across the bottom here we have a couple of different buttons. We have our Google Maps button here. And you can see this is a real responsive screen. As we drag it around, we can pinch and zoom in and zoom out and do all the things that you would expect Google Maps to do, right. Our next button here is our phone button. And with the phone button we can make a phone call here. I can see my incoming and outgoing phone calls or I could bring up a keypad here. But really I'm going to make all of my phone calls by voice, ok.

The next button over here is our music button. With the music we can play any of the sources that the in-dash radio can play, so maybe SD card, SiriusXM, CD, AM/FM. Any of the sources that the radio can play, plus if you have music apps on your phone we can play any of those music apps as well. Right here we're playing iHeartRadio. If I touch here, we can open this up and I have Spotify or Google Play music available as well, and we could choose one of those.

Now right here is my overview screen. And my overview screen is kind of the main screen for Android Auto. This shows me the local weather. If I have missed phone calls, or maybe voice mail messages or text messages, that information shows up here and I can play back a text message or a voice mail from this screen. So let's send a text message first. "Send a text message to Felonious. Let's get together this evening for dinner."

Head unit: "Here's your text to Felonious. Let's get together this evening for dinner. Do you want to send it?"

Harry: "Absolutely."

Head unit: "Sending message."

Harry: Ok, so we've sent off a text message to Felonious. Hopefully he'll send one back to us. In the meantime let's make a phone call. "Call Steve."

Head unit: "Calling Steve's mobile."

Harry: Ok, we open the telephone screen automatically and we're making a phone call to Steve. We'll hang up before Steve answers though. All right now I'm gonna do a kind of a Google search. "What's the weather like today in Washington, D.C.?"

Head unit: "Today's forecast for Washington is 81 degrees and partly cloudy."

Harry: Nice day in Washington. Now we'll ask about the zoo. "What are the hours for the zoo?"

Head unit: "Smithsonian National Zoological Park is open until 6 p.m."

Harry: Ok, so it automatically knew we were talking about the zoo in Washington, D.C. from our previous conversation. Here we automatically drop a marker on the map and we create a route to go there in about two hours and some change, or we can give them a call to get some more information. So we can use this for turn by turn navigation as well. "Navigate to Richmond airport."

Head unit: "Navigating to Richmond International Airport."

Harry: Alright, so we create a route to go to the airport, and on the screen you'll see while we're driving we get full turn-by-turn instruction. We get lane information on the screen to show us what's the best lane to be in for our next turn, and plus we'll see traffic information on the route that is coming in from Waze, from Waze users.

Cory: "And while that's going can we still listen to music from other parts of Android Auto?"

Harry: Sure, you can use the phone to play back music if you want to, or you can play back music from any of the other sources from the in-dash receiver. Let's check on that text message.

Head unit: "Here's the message. 8 p.m. sounds great."

Harry: Great, dinner date tonight 8 o'clock. So let me do one more really cool demonstration for you, and we'll switch between Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. You have to have your Apple phone, iPhone, plugged into USB number one. That's the upper one. And your Android phone has to be plugged into USB number two. And when I do that, I can switch out to the Pioneer system. I go into my settings here. Here's my smartphone setup and I can switch to iPod iPhone. When we do that I'll just hit the X here and in a couple of seconds we'll see CarPlay up on the screen.

Cory: Harry, thanks for being here. It's great to get our hands on Android Auto finally. See you next time.

Harry: Alright, we'll see ya.

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