Google’s Car Home app for Android provides a user interface with nice big buttons for apps you’re most likely to need if you’ve mounted your phone in a vehicle. There are icons for navigation, phone, voice search, music, and contacts. But what if you’d rather use a different music player, or you never use Voice Search in the car and want to us that space for a different app? Now you can.
Google has launched a new version of the Car Home app which allows you to customize the apps that show up on the Car Home screen.
It’s available as a free download from the Android Market. It won’t show up as an update, because you have to download the app first — even if you’re using a version of Android that already has a Car Home feature. This is the latest in Google’s move to separate out some of the core Android apps from the operating system.
You can either open the Car Home app manually, or have it launch automatically when you attach your phone to a car dock or pair your phone with a Bluetooth device. The new app also lets you choose your own wallpaper and customize the color of shortcuts.
Car Home 2.2.1 is available for the Google Nexus One and Motorola Droid, and currently only supports Google Android 2.2.
Some of the version/hardware checks are beginning to piss me off. I have an older version of CarHome working perfectly in my 2.2 ROM, running on an HTC Magic. The update will not install, even manually, via adb. Seems like sloppy coding to me to not just allow it to run on any hardware running 2.2.
This looks great, thanks for sharing.