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 layout can add extra controls, such as like, shuffle, and repeat, depending on the music app.
- Whether these additional buttons appear depends on the head unit’s display.
Google announced a broad Android Auto makeover at I/O 2026, and some of those changes are now beginning to reach drivers. For example, just today we saw that Google Maps’ new Immersive Navigation interface appears to be slowly rolling out, bringing 3D buildings and clearer road features to the dashboard. We’ve now 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 layout in a recent version of Android Auto. The current dashboard card uses the album artwork as a full-size background, with the song details and playback controls layered over it. It already includes Google’s newer squiggly 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 artwork a more conventional home in the center, while its colors are used to create a blurred background. The song title and artist also move beneath the artwork and are centered, making the whole card look less busy than the current version.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
As the image above shows, the redesign can also add more playback controls to the dashboard card. Depending on the music app, these can include buttons such as like, shuffle, and repeat. Whether you actually see them will also depend on your head unit’s display density, with larger or higher-DPI screens able to fit the extra controls. In those layouts, the play/pause button moves into a more central position.
This change only affects the media card shown alongside navigation on the Android Auto dashboard. Opening the media app in full-screen mode still brings up the existing player interface.
As with any feature uncovered 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 earlier announcement and the direction Google suggested the app would take, this change is one that’s likely to appear sooner rather than later.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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