There is no formally published data on how many times Google said the word “AI” at its annual developer conference, Google I/O 2026. But it had said it quite a lot throughout the entire event, and its AI announcements received plenty of attention.
Unfortunately, the flood of AI announcements has overshadowed many important updates the company shared about Android for Cars. One of the company’s biggest announcements related to Android Auto was the revamp of media apps. We haven’t seen much of that coming to fruition just yet, but the Mountain View tech giant has now set its sights on revamping the dashboard media card.
According to an APK teardown conducted by our friends at Android Authority, Google is now working on a redesigned media card for your car’s dashboard.
It could mean more control options for your music apps
Hours after Google started rolling out a huge upgrade for Google Maps in Android Auto, we’ve learned that Google is testing a visual upgrade to its media dashboard card that’s more useful than the current one.
Android Authority managed to activate the new layout on their devices, and as per the details we see, the revamped card shows that the album artwork is no longer a full-sized background. Instead, we see a blurred background that uses the same color tone as the album artwork.
The dashboard media card now shows the album artwork more prominently, with a matching color palette in the background. On the contrary, the current one uses the album artwork as a full-size background. This may seem modern, but it could be a little distracting for drivers.
Moreover, the artist and the song title have now moved from the left to the center. Another change is that they now sit just below the album art, with playback options appearing right underneath them.
The leaked layout has also shown that the redesigned dashboard media card has room for more playback controls. For example, other than the play/puse and skip buttons, we can see options like shuffle, repeat, and like tracks.
However, these changes aren’t available for the media apps in full-screen mode. As things stand right now, these visual upgrades impact only the standard driving view, where the map occupies the largest portion of the screen, and a compact widget for music apps takes up the rest of the space.
As for when these changes will appear on Android Auto, Google hasn’t made it official, but the changes appear to be close to completion. If that’s the case, we can expect changes to appear soon. Maybe within a few months, hopefully.
