The easiest way to use your mobile phone while in the car is with an infotainment system, and if your phone is Android and you have a compatible car, then we are talking about Android Auto: an adapted interface, easier use and, essentially, the best navigation, music and audio and messaging apps . Of course, it is also useful to remember this Android Auto isn’t standalone and is still a reflection of your phone.

This point is important because if the data speed of our mobile is quite low, Android Auto will use this to serve us the desired content, and if we are making long trips or doing this frequently, then Google’s infotainment system could be one glutton megabyte.

If you’ve ever wondered How much data does Android Auto use and which are the worst compatible apps? You can clear your doubts in this article in terms of consumption of your rate.

Before we get started, a little explanation of how Android Auto works

In the introduction section we give you A few tips to solve this mystery: The apps that spend the most will be the ones that consume megabytes and are compatible when used with our phone. This last point is important because, for example, Google does not allow you to watch YouTube (though there is a trick to do this) or Netflix (yes, there is a way to do this too, but it is troublesome).

Briefly: Android Auto doesn’t consume data on its ownIn fact, you can use it in airplane mode (wired, of course) without any problems, but how much data there is and how wide the margin is here is determined by the applications you open on your mobile phone (i.e. via Android Auto), both according to the type of applications, their management and the cache they store.

The gist is that you use an app via Android Auto. Spend the same amount of mobile data as if you were using the app directly on your phone. From here it’s time to do a little review of compatible apps.

These are the activities that use the most mobile data in Android Auto

Considering the above, the first thing that comes to mind is this: video playback stream. It’s worth noting that months ago Google officially announced the arrival of YouTube videos (although there’s now a trick to doing so) and also announced its compatibility with Prime Video. As a guide, and although it depends on the quality, using a YouTube video with a modest quality of 480p as a reference (neither the quality nor the diagonal of the screen deserves us to expand further) means a little more than half a gigabyte (562MB). In the case of Prime Video at 480p we will spend 800 MB per hour.

Now, in practice, the arrival of YouTube and Prime Video will be gradual; It’s actually exclusive to Android, which is integrated into Google Built-in auto in select Renault, Polestar and Volvo cars for now. On the other hand, although you may have installed YouTube on your Android Auto more to try out than anything else, its use in my daily life has been marginal. Not watching videos while the vehicle is running is a matter of both practicality and safety, and I’m not in the cabin without driving long enough to benefit from it. Briefly, It is unusual for us to watch videos while driving.

Having clarified this point, the next category of apps that use the most data is listening streaming music. The data consumed will, as in the previous case, also depend on the quality settings we have configured.

Therefore, it is enough to know how much data each of the main music platforms consumes. If we take Spotify as an example, we find four different configurations:

• Low quality: 24 kbps.
• Normal quality: 96 kbps.
• High quality: 160 kbps.
• Exceptional quality: 320 kbps.

Approximately, Within an hour using Spotify We will spend 10 MB, 43 MB, 72 MB and 144 MB on these four configurations respectively. In the case of Amazon Music and its three modes (automatic, standard and data saving), if we opt for the most ambitious version of 256 kbps, we will consume 115.2 MB in one hour.

Another category to consider when it comes to data consumption is navigation applications. The navigation app you use while driving downloads more and more maps and real-time update with information (if you have this function). From here the amount of data will depend on where you’re going.

In 2020, OCU conducted a study on data consumption of major free navigation apps including Google Maps, Waze, Magic, and the paid TomTom app on both iOS and Android. We focus on Google operating system and for a 12 kilometer journeyThe least consuming device was TomTom with 0.31 MB, followed by Waze with 1.43 MB, Google Maps with 4.53 MB and Magic with 6.8 MB. However, this is a guide and figures may be higher depending on the region.

In this sense, considering how common it is to use browsers and listen to music, to keep mobile data consumption at bay It is recommended that you download the content before traveling and configure the relevant applications to play at low quality.

Cover | Eva Rodríguez de Luis and Save icons created by Sonnycandra – Flaticon

Xataka on Android | Android Auto, detailed guide: what is it, how it works, how to connect your mobile phone and the best thing you can do