Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung developed a feature called location-based navigation that scans your messages for locations and lets you quickly start navigating to those destinations from your car screen.
- This feature is available in Samsung Auto, which is Samsung’s version of Android Auto available in the Chinese version of One UI.
- Android Auto currently doesn’t offer an equivalent feature, but we argue it should for safety reasons.
Android Auto is one of Android’s best features, since it lets you safely access many of your phone’s features while you’re driving. It’s not the only phone projection implementation, though. In China, where Android Auto isn’t available, Samsung offers its own version called Samsung Auto. Samsung Auto offers many of the same capabilities as Android Auto, but it has one neat feature that we’d like Google to copy: location-based navigation.
Most people input a destination before driving, but sometimes, drivers must change destinations mid-drive. This could happen for several reasons, but when it does, inputting the new destination can be difficult without pulling over. Although it’s possible to change destinations while driving, Android Auto only allows voice input while driving. The new destination may have an address that’s hard to say or require disambiguation in the case of businesses, forcing drivers to briefly take their eyes off the road to choose the right location on the car screen. Picking up your phone and manually typing the new address into a navigation app is incredibly dangerous to do while driving.
Samsung’s location-based navigation feature solves this issue by scanning incoming messages for locations and providing an option to change the destination on the car screen. When you receive a message that contains location information, Samsung Auto will display a notification with a button to navigate to the location.
This is useful when someone messages a new location after you’ve already started driving. Instead of listening to or reading the message to get the new address, which you then have to manually set as your new destination, you just tap a button in the notification shown on your car screen.
When I first learned about this feature, I was surprised by how simple yet clever it is. Most Android phones already process notifications to extract information like phone numbers, URLs, and addresses. That’s why notifications with them have smart action buttons that let you quickly place a call, open the link in a web browser, or view the location in Google Maps.
Android has long shown these buttons on phones, but the same notifications on Android Auto don’t show them unless you manually open the notifications panel. Even then, Android Auto only shows the navigation smart action when there’s only a single message; if a contact sends you multiple messages, the smart action won’t be shown.
There’s no reason why this feature should only exist in Samsung’s version of Android Auto. Google should quickly bring it to Android Auto for users outside of China, as it would make changing destinations safer while driving.
