Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android Auto is testing a redesigned dashboard media card with centered album art and a blurred background.
- The new design may add additional controls, such as like, shuffle, and repeat, depending on the music app.
- The appearance of these additional buttons depends on the display of the main unit.
Google announced a Extensive renewal of Android Auto at I/O 2026and some of those changes are now starting to reach drivers. For example, just today we saw that The new immersive navigation interface of Google Maps appears to be slowly rolling out, bringing 3D buildings and clearer road features to the dashboard. Now we’ve found another visual update that wasn’t clearly shown in Google’s I/O announcement materials: a redesigned media card for the Android Auto dashboard.
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We managed to activate the new design in a recent version of Android Auto. The current panel card uses the album art as a full-size background, with song details and playback controls overlaid. It already includes Google’s new wavy progress bar and updated buttons, which began rolling out more widely earlier this year. You can see examples of the current and potentially new cards in the two images below.
The revised card gives the album art a more conventional home in the center, while its colors are used to create a blurred background. The song title and artist are also moved below the artwork and centered, making the entire card look less busy than the current version.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
As the image above shows, the redesign may also add more playback controls to the dashboard card. Depending on the music app, these may include buttons like Like, Shuffle, and Repeat. Whether you actually see them will also depend on the screen density of your head unit, with larger or higher DPI screens able to accommodate additional controls. On those designs, the play/pause button is moved to a more central position.
This change only affects the media card displayed next to the navigation in the Android Auto dashboard. When you open the media app in full screen mode, the existing player interface still appears.
As with any feature discovered in an APK teardown, this redesign is likely still a work in progress, so Google may change the design further or decide not to release it. That said, given the previous announcement and the direction Google suggested the app would take, it’s likely this change will appear sooner rather than later.
⚠️ A APK Teardown It helps predict features that may come to a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, such planned features may not make it to a public release.
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