Provide recommendations

The final design step for Android Auto is to enhance your app’s experience by identifying 10 media items to be showcased as recommendations.

On Android Auto, when a user isn’t listening to anything, a content recommendation can appear in the dashboard. If the recommendation is appealing enough, the user will tap it to start listening.

If the app doesn’t provide a source for these recommendations, the default logic is to pull recommendations from the top of the browse tree – which may not provide the most appealing set of recommendations. For example, this default logic might suggest multiple episodes of the same podcast, when a better idea might be to provide recommendations for a variety of podcasts.

In considering what media content to suggest in the car, keep the driving context in mind. You may want to pull your recommendations from the user’s listening history in the car, rather than from what they listen to in their living room.

Note: Apps can send recommendations via the media browser service, using a lookup key in the EXTRA_SUGGESTED string. For details, consult EXTRA_SUGGESTED.

Recommendation example

This example shows a dashboard that supplies a For You pane with suggested playlists (Android Auto example).

Recommendation requirements

In the table below, SHOULD requirements are recommended but not required.

Requirement level	Requirements
SHOULD	App developers should: Provide a source from which to pull relevant media recommendations for users

Rationale:

• Relevant recommendations help drivers quickly choose music, then look back at the road