Android Auto's Reboot Issue Was Seemingly Caused By Obscure Developer Settings

If you recently heard about strange reboot issues with Android Auto but didn’t run into those problems yourself, it seems the reason is that these issues were seemingly caused by developer settings.

Alarms were sounded last week regarding a potential new Android Auto bug that was causing smartphones to reboot at random while using Android Auto. That traces back to a Reddit thread where five separate users were reporting the same behavior. Android Auto would start up on their car’s display, but would cause a “soft” reboot on their phone when they interacted with certain parts of the experience. “Soft” reboot in this context means that the Android Auto session ends and the device goes into a locked state, rather than going through a full reboot.

We couldn’t find additional reports of this behavior on Google’s support forums or other typical channels where Android Auto problems surface.

That appears to be due to how this reboot “issue” arose, as it was apparently tied to some fairly obscure Android developer settings.

In a Reddit comment, one user found on February 21st that disabling the developer settings for “Force Desktop Mode” fixed the problem. It was claimed that the Android Auto 13.8 update, rolling out now, fixed the problem, but it appears that the version installed makes no difference in this case. The problem did first appear with Android Auto 13.4, though, and downgrading to version 13.3 fixed the problem for some. So, at some point, it stands to reason that a later Android Auto update will fully solve this problem, even if the fairly obscure developer setting seems to be the root cause.

Meanwhile, there were more widespread problems with wireless Android Auto recently, as users were running into problems with the latest updates that caused wireless connectivity to break. It’s unclear if the latest release, Android Auto 13.8, solves these problems.