Android Auto on my HR-V's Android 4.0.4 head unit

I recently bought a 2018 Honda HR-V as our family car. It has a 7” touchscreen running Android 4.0.4, a version so old it predates Android Auto by about three years. It runs Android Auto now anyway, thanks to a small app I built over the course of a week. The big clock is the head unit’s own. I’ve since turned it off. The Honda is great. Its head unit isn’t. It has no Play Store, and Honda’s own app store has very few apps. The usual routes to Android Auto are swapping in the head unit from a 2019 HR-V, or rooting the existing one and installing one of the community-built apps. I didn’t fancy hardware mods on a new car, and getting the apps running looked like a lot of digging through forum posts and downloading old builds from random sites. After my experience with installing an aftermarket Android unit in our old Qashqai, I wasn’t keen on more of that kind of fiddling. Rolling my own So naturally, I did a different kind of fiddling instead, and built something new. A head unit…

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