Itd be cool if they reverse the Android auto protocol so anything can use the car displays.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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There are wireless adaptors for android auto and CarPlay that relay to head units that require a usb connection you can get cheaply. It’s already been done. But I haven’t name able to find a project supporting it on Linux yet.
Those are not really handling the protocol. The phone still has to show a cert signed by some Google CA and iirc those are pretty shortlived and regularly refreshed by the android Auto app.
Earlier units actually took in CarPlay streams and converted them to android auto streams. Thats…not something that’s going intended.
After some finaggling I managed to compile it (here's the nix file I used to get the dependencies). It's looking basic but actually promising! Here are some screenshots (sorry for potato quality, it's the only one Lemmy allows me to upload at for some reason):
The search seems quite nice, it seems to search by names but also allows to search for (some?) OSM tags, e.g. amenity:drinking_water shows up water fountains around you. I'm actually annoyed that other apps don't allow you to do so this easily.
The navigation also seems to work-ish, which is surprising for such a young app. The only remaining things before it's really useful is downloadable maps and offline routing.
Oh freaking nice! It looks amazing! Thanks for sharing the screenshots!
Is the link not working or is it an issue on my end?
It was indeed broken, fixed now.
If you decide to actually go for it, in order to get it to compile I did something like this:
nix-shell
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j$(nproc)
wrapQtApp bin/CarNavigation
NIXPKGS_QT6_QML_IMPORT_PATH=/nix/store/66hlc66dkinbrc7ifq0v6ynaq3vkv35y-maplibre-native-qt-3.0.0/qml bin/CarNavigation
(I'm not sure why the wrapQtApp doesn't pick up maplibre, maybe it's something to do with the patches they apply, didn't have time to investigate. I also didn't have the time to investigate what is needed to get it "installed", hence to installPhase and nix-build doesn't work)
If they can manage this and works with grapheneos as an auto headunit I would do be so excited. Or if I can just cast it basically
It'd be cool if they managed to get OsmAnd~ on linux
FYI there's a semi-dead fork of OsmAnd called OffRoad which runs on desktop OS's, including Linux. But it's a bit borked and doesn't support most of the cool features.
Oh cool, I might think about contributing if it's written in something I know
I use CoMaps on Linux (as well as mobile) and it works quite well. It uses data from OpenStreetMaps.
CoMaps is the only lightweight and simple app that i can get my wife to use on GOS. Pretty good. Organic Maps disappointing. Osmand too many features for someone that just needs to get from a to b. Didnt know that ut could run on linux.
That's cute(qt)
Oh damn I used to make this joke all the time back in college programming classes. I miss that lol
I like Qt.
I fail to see the point. The company sells laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled not phones which are the targets of such apps. Linux phones are still in their infancy and for Android we do have excellent apps like Mapy pulling their data from OSM. What am I missing?
They may be working on a Linux-based car head unit, which is kinda between a phone and a laptop (like a tablet, which it basically is). If that's the case, something like this would be a required app, and current (non-android) Linux offerings are somewhat limited (basically it's just PureMaps and a couple forks, which all work but are a bit janky). If they end up with something useful, it would be great for both phones and cars.
So building a head unit when that market has all but died out. Seems like the time for that has passed.
This makes a lot of sense actually. It'd be awesome to have more options for head units. I'm not sure about the target though, amateurs working on their car or restoring old models? I don't see a lot of companies choosing a Linux based head unit for their cars. But the same argument could be said for Linux phones too.
As the owner of multiple cars from the '90s and 2000s, I 100% need a Linux head unit.
I’m not sure about the target though, amateurs working on their car or restoring old models?
Yeah, personally I'd be their target audience, if they announce it soon enough and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I can also see some european manufacturers looking to decouple from the US tech being somewhat interested.
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I think organizations working around sensitive installations could be interested.
For example the car used to drive around nuclear powerplants, military installations or just industrial equipment. Modern cars have GPS and cameras and you don't want to have random cameras recording around sensitive installations.
They could remove the cameras but then the car would not be road legal anymore.
A Linux based head unit would allow them to customize it to the level of security they require while still retaining the benefit of modern cars.
It's a niche but a niche that have the means to infest a lot in development
So there going to reverse engineer the car systems and slap in this Linux head unit? Don't see that happening head units control so much in modern cars.
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The repository is called "car navigation" so yeah.
Qt Company itself also invests heavily in Qt for Automotive platforms.
I think about this a lot and if you can even consider Linux phones in their infancy. There are no modern Linux phones that fully work as a phone. Its the joke about this being the year of Linux over and over. Ubuntu touch was started in 2011 and since then it hasn't changed or advanced in any meaningful way. Every other Linux phone distro is basically the same story. I would love to even be able to get a Jolla phone in the US, but that's not an option. I occasionally see people say they are using Linux phones as a daily driver, and then find out they are using some obscure or ancient hard to get phone. Or better yet, it's just a secondary phone. They are a curiosity at best which makes me sad.
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Ooooooo
Description: Car navigation application for Linux A turn-by-turn car navigation app built with Qt 6, MapLibre, and OpenStreetMap data. Features include voice guidance, Overture Maps POI search, and offline route calculation via OSRM or Valhalla.
I am confused. Looking at the code, both OSRM and Valhalla are actually online routing services and require an internet connection. There is no offline route calculation in this code as far as I can tell.
Yeah, it doesn't have downloadable maps or offline routing (at least yet). It does however cache the map tiles it downloaded, and it seems to also cache some POIs (e.g. I can see opening hours for shops around me even without the internet).
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