ANDROID AUTO Issues

[riteshshukla04]

Can I have a detailed issue of android auto problems you are facing

[PeachesMLG]

You need to begin playing a song before turning your car on. otherwise you are stuck on a loading wheel
Once turned on you cannot change the playlist from your car, only move through songs in that playlist
playing more than x songs in a playlist returns "Source Error"

[irhop]

You get a spinner constantly, until you manually start the app on Android. Exactly the same as @PeachesMLG is mentioning. Running the latest version of Android Auto, Android version 16 1 July 2026 security update / OnePlus Open.

Can only see the songs of that particular playlist.

[JailbreakSuv]

The app would mainly keep loading for me no matter what I do, even if I start a song before plugging my phone into the car it would never load the app but the song would continue playing.

Samsung S24 Ultra One Ui 8.5, Android 16, google play update September 1,2026

[leonardopieralli]

Hi! Here is a detailed report of the Android Auto problem I'm having, plus what I found looking at the code.

Device: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, One UI 9
App: Jellify 1.2.7 from Google Play, Jellyfin server self-hosted

What happens

1. Jellify is closed (not running in the background).
2. I start the car and Android Auto connects.
3. Opening Jellify in Android Auto shows an endless loading spinner. The browse UI never appears.
4. Even if I start playback, audio works but the Android Auto UI stays incomplete (no proper now-playing / browse screen).

Workaround: open Jellify on the phone first, then turn the car off and on again. After Android Auto reconnects, everything works.

Because of this, Android Auto's "start media automatically" behaviour can't work with Jellify: with Plexamp, Android Auto launched the app on its own when it was closed, and it was ready right away.

What I think is causing it

Note: I'm on 1.2.7, but the code analysis below is based on the current main branch (package.json 1.2.10, react-native-nitro-player 1.6.1). As far as I can tell the relevant code is still the same there.

1. In NitroPlayerMediaBrowserService.kt, the static flag isAndroidAutoEnabled defaults to false. It is only set to true in TrackPlayerPlayback.kt when the JS side configures the player (androidAutoEnabled: Platform.OS === 'android' in src/services/player/index.ts, called from registerNitroPlayer() in index.js). When Android Auto binds to the service while the app is cold, the JS runtime hasn't run yet, so onGetRoot() returns EMPTY_ROOT_ID and onLoadChildren() returns an empty list → endless loading.

2. In NitroPlayerMediaBrowserService.onCreate(), sessionToken is only set if mediaSessionManager?.mediaSession already exists. On a cold start the session isn't created yet, so the browser service has no session token and Android Auto has no controls attached. There is no later call to set the token once the session becomes available.

3. The browse tree itself (publishMediaLibrary() in src/services/android-auto.ts) is also built only from the JS side, from the React Query cache (recents / frequents), so on a cold start there is nothing to show even if the flag were enabled.

Possible fixes

• Persist the "Android Auto enabled" setting natively (e.g. SharedPreferences, or default it to true on Android) so the service can answer onGetRoot() without the JS runtime.
• Set the session token lazily: when the MediaSession is created after the browser service, call setSessionToken(...) and notifyChildrenChanged(ROOT_ID).
• Provide a native fallback browse tree on cold start (e.g. the persisted playlists / last queue), and implement playback resumption (Media3 onPlaybackResumption) so Android Auto can auto-start Jellify like other music apps.

Happy to test a build if that helps. Thanks for the great work on Jellify!