AutoSpace is an Android Auto alternative for the phone: a frosted-glass Material 3 interface, a no-AI browser with its own media player, Vela navigation, on-device spoken voice, an opt-in AI assistant, and custom screen resolutions.
AutoSpace is a fork of Gearslip
by Twink Software LLC, rebuilt around that interface and feature set. It is
licensed under AGPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). This fork is not affiliated with,
endorsed by, or sponsored by Twink Software LLC or Google LLC.
Upstream baseline: twinksoftware/Gearslip commit
e8f51f4947d6edeb3d3e9dc52ae6598d867f677a(0.3.01-alpha). AutoSpace's own changes are listed inCHANGELOG.md.
AutoSpace speaks the Android Auto protocol directly to a car head unit, over USB or wirelessly, with no Google software in the path. It acts as a Car App Library host: an app that ships a car interface hands AutoSpace a template, and AutoSpace renders that template natively on the car screen. For apps without a car interface, AutoSpace offers a separate screen-sharing mode that mirrors the phone.
- Car interface. Frost, Bare, Tactile, Ink, Pitlane, Verve, Horizon, Heirloom, Blueprint, Sector, Silhouette, and Morph control styles, with color schemes Canvas, Material You, Nocturne, Pitlane, Circuit, Heritage, Verve, and Horizon, an independent Light / Dark / System appearance mode, Regular / Pitch dark surfaces (Pitch is pure black), and one-tap style-and-scheme pairs for Pitlane, Verve, Heritage, Canvas, Circuit, Nocturne, and Material You. A flat alphabetical launcher with a pinned row, drag-to-reorder, and sliders for icon, tile, and overall size. Icon packs from installed third-party packs apply across the launcher and per app; system icons are the default. Quick brightness is two taps away, from the side rail or the dashboard, and dims the whole car screen. Navigation uses a side rail instead of a bottom bar; with the Meridian map theme the rail floats, and on narrow displays it becomes a floating bottom pill.
- Phone calls. Dial from a keypad, or search your contacts, then confirm before the call goes out. When a call comes in, answer or decline it on the car screen. An optional call-speaker toggle (off by default) tries the phone's speaker for calls; the car's Bluetooth route may still win, because call routing belongs to the system dialer.
- Navigation. AutoSpace hosts real Car App Library map apps on the car screen. Vela Maps is the default navigation app, with rough edges. The Meridian map theme restyles AutoSpace's map chrome in dark teal; the themed chrome matching your style and scheme stays the default. Map panes collapse to a slim bar that expands on tap. During navigation, the ETA pill sits low at the bottom; a docked media card sits low too, stepping aside so it never covers the pill.
- Music. Browse, play, and queue tracks from a car-enabled media app, with a Now Playing view, an Up Next queue, and lyrics. Type a search, and apps that accept one play the best match. Car skip buttons seek within the video player and skip tracks outside it. Browse rows show a fallback glyph when a node has no art.
- The web. A browser with a floating frost bar, tabs, saved pages and
history, a strict popup blocker, reader mode, text zoom, find-in-page,
and an open-on-phone handoff. Full ad blocking is built in (EasyList,
EasyPrivacy, and the other standard lists, refreshed daily), with
per-host allow rules in the browser menu. The default search is no-AI DuckDuckGo
(
noai.duckduckgo.com). A media finder lists playable media the page exposes (direct files, HLS, DASH) and opens it in AutoSpace's own Media3 player. Browser pages are never themed: no force-dark, no algorithmic darkening. Pages render as authored. - Video player. Speed, sleep timer, audio tracks, subtitles (with a style picker in car Settings), quality choices, pinch zoom and pan, and a stall watchdog. While driving, video shows its picture only after you confirm you are a passenger; otherwise you hear the audio. A mini video card shows the video's title (not its address), sizes small, large, or fullscreen, drags while parked per session, and keeps its position when you switch between the mini card and the full player, in both directions.
- Passenger gates. Entering the browser or the video player while the car is moving asks "Are you driving?" "I'm a passenger" opens it normally; "Yes" closes the browser or drops video to audio-only. The allowance lasts for that browser/player session. This is an honesty gate: the app cannot verify who tapped.
- Screen sharing. Fit is the default, Fill is one tap away, and there is never a stretch mode. Pinch zooms 1x–3x, drag pans while zoomed, and a player-style chrome row (glyph buttons, no labels) auto-hides. Exits never trap you: the car's Back button, the on-screen exit button, or the phone's Stop. Touch relay is single-finger while mirroring.
- Resolutions. Per-vehicle resolution (Auto / 720p / 1080p / 2K / 4K), resolved only against configurations the head unit actually offers — nearest offered size at or below, never an invented one. 2K/4K are wired-first; on encoder failure or a black screen it falls back to 1080p.
- Voice, spoken. AutoSpace speaks with Kokoro-82M (Hexgrad, Apache 2.0),
entirely on the phone, for assistant replies, read-aloud messages, and
spoken directions — the same voice for all three. All 53 Kokoro voices
are offered, with American Adam (
am_adam) the default, and Piper (MIT) as fallback. No voice ships in the APK: Kokoro (~350 MB) and Piper (~68 MB) download once from Settings, with resume and exact-size validation. If neither is downloaded, replies stay silent rather than borrowing the phone's voice. - Voice, listening. Speech turns into text on the phone, and nothing you say leaves it. Live words come from Kroko; final words from Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 by default (Canary stays available). A "Hey AutoSpace" / "Hey Gearslip" hotword (off by default) listens during a car session, with an option to listen on the phone microphone.
- Voice commands. Local commands run on keyword matching (plus your own custom voice keywords): navigate, play music, open apps, read and reply to messages, change brightness and volume, stop navigation, ETA and distance, repeat the last direction, "say that again" for the last reply, and more, including guarded synonym matching. Two honest limits, stated in the replies themselves: ending an active call needs the dialer, and a new message can only be sent by replying to a thread that already exists. Emergency calls always ask for a spoken confirmation first. After a navigation reply, the assistant does not keep listening, so music and talk in the car cannot cancel the trip.
- AI assistant (opt-in, bring your own key). When local commands
cannot answer, an AI assistant can: Groq is the default provider
(
openai/gpt-oss-20b), Gemini stays as an experimental provider. Answers are short, grounded in web search when the question needs it, and shown with a small AI badge plus a provider glyph (globe for Groq, Google G for Gemini) — never a spoken "From AI:" prefix. Actions the AI suggests (navigate, open an app, search, call, reply, media, volume, brightness, toggles, timers, readouts) are confirmed with you before they run, and emergency calls never go through the AI. The key is stored on the phone in the Android Keystore and never leaves it except to the provider you chose. The assistant remembers the conversation: built-in spoken replies join the session context, so a follow-up like "in more detail" keeps the place you already gave, and weather answers honor the place you named. - Messages and notifications. New messages appear as a small card on the car screen. AutoSpace reads each one aloud, and you reply by voice or with a quick reply. Only messages, missed calls, alarms, and reminders interrupt you; the rest wait on the dashboard.
- Dashboard. The week's calendar (read locally from the device, not from any cloud account) next to the current and coming weather.
- Car controls. Steering wheel buttons, control knobs, and D-pads all work.
- Floating card and widgets. The media card floats over the full map (bottom passenger side, dismissible for the session) and is draggable while parked, per session, or docked to its Start, Center, or End position; during navigation a docked card sits low. A home widget column (weather, notifications digest, next event) restacks around turn cards and full-screen templates. While driving with navigation on, the widget column hides while the car is moving; the rail's widgets button recalls it at a glance. A live conversation widget shows the ongoing exchange, themed to the assistant, with its own dismiss. The Meridian map theme is a map-theme choice in settings.
- Car preview and couch testing. The phone app previews the car UI, with its own settings page: screen size, density, preview-only theme, touch markers, simulated driving, and a test mode that fakes a car session on the couch (clearly bannered, never persisted, auto-off when a real car connects). A log viewer shares the session log and the last launch trace; crash reports write themselves to Downloads/AutoSpace.
- Wired or wireless. Plug the phone into the car's USB port, or, in a car with wireless Android Auto, tap Connect wirelessly and pick the car. Pair the phone with the car over Bluetooth first.
- Setup walks you through it. First launch asks for the Android Auto certificate, then one permission at a time, each with a plain reason and an Allow or Skip.
- Templated apps work. AutoSpace renders the template types the Car App Library defines, and it draws its own keyboard for search, sign-in, and text fields.
- Some apps refuse AutoSpace as a host. Apps whose car library accepts only Android Auto itself (upstream, this included Spotify, Waze, and Google Messages) still refuse. Spotify still plays through AutoSpace's own player. This is inherited upstream behaviour, not re-tested app by app for this fork.
- Calls use the car's Bluetooth, as they do in Android Auto. Pair the phone with the car to hear calls through its speakers.
- Music reaches the car over Bluetooth or USB. Setup asks which. Bluetooth is the default. USB sounds a little clearer, with no delay, but Android shows a screen-share consent dialog once per drive. AutoSpace never reads the screen; capturing playback is the only way an ordinary app can pass another app's audio along.
- AutoSpace needs no adb, root, or Shizuku. Every feature relies on an ordinary Android permission or an on-device consent dialog.
- First public beta published: 0.5.0-beta.1. The beta line follows the alpha; it is a prerelease, and the updater treats it as one. In-app updates are active: Stable, Beta, and Alpha channels, with the channel default following the build stage (alpha builds default to Alpha; a channel you save yourself always wins). Release builds ship as GitHub releases (see below). Debug builds no longer ship at all: CI runs the unit tests only, and the in-app updater follows the Stable, Beta, and Alpha channels.
Releases are published on the
releases page.
The first public beta is 0.5.0-beta.1, a prerelease. The release
package is app.autospace, signed with the fork's own permanent
release key under v2-scheme-only signing. Its certificate SHA-256
fingerprint, verified against the shipped beta APK, is:
4E:AA:F7:9C:7B:C5:07:9B:C4:3A:B0:36:03:9A:06:67:67:77:53:33:92:A0:6E:10:C5:EB:CC:44:D6:12:F1:31
Check your copy against that fingerprint before installing (AppVerifier
or apksigner verify --print-certs).
Debug builds are signed with the committed debug key in
gearslip/debug.keystore (standard debug credentials — a shared debug
key, never a release key). Its certificate SHA-256 fingerprint, verified
against both the keystore and the shipped debug APK, is:
AB:7B:DB:B2:1E:F9:B3:5A:C9:26:11:5A:F5:C6:62:32:25:16:4A:9C:53:83:A1:A0:23:B6:FA:1E:33:62:06:2E
Debug builds install as app.autospace.dev.
You need Android Studio, or the Android SDK with JDK 21. Gradle downloads the NDK, CMake, and the speech library on the first build.
./gradlew :gearslip:assembleStandardDebug
CI (.github/workflows/debug.yml, on every push to main and every pull
request) runs the unit tests only — since 0.4.1-alpha it no longer builds or
publishes a debug APK, because every build ships as a prerelease. Tagged v*
pushes run .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds the signed release
APK and publishes it as a prerelease.
A release build needs a signing key. Copy keystore.properties.example
to keystore.properties, fill in your own values, and run
./gradlew :gearslip:assembleStandardRelease. Git ignores both the properties
file and the keystore. Never commit a release key.
Current line: 0.5.0-beta.7, versionCode 173 (release package
app.autospace; debug builds install as app.autospace.dev).
AutoSpace is an independent program, written to work with car head units. What it knows of the protocol comes from public open-source projects such as aasdk and open-android-auto, and it contains none of Google's Android Auto code.
AutoSpace ships without a certificate. On first launch you choose where yours comes from: download the one the aasdk project publishes, or import a file of your own. The certificate stays on your phone. AutoSpace never uploads, backs up, or logs it.
Bug reports from real cars help most, and pull requests are welcome. Open an issue on GitHub and include your car's make, model, and year, whether the head unit is the original one, and the log from the drive (phone app: Settings, then Logs, then Share log).
Pull requests go against main, one change each, with how you tested
it: which car or head unit, which phone, and which apps. Contributions
are under AGPL-3.0. This fork has no contributor license agreement.
The upstream Gearslip CLA — which grants rights to Twink Software LLC,
including for commercial relicensing — does not apply to this fork and
has been removed; do not sign it for AutoSpace work.
docs/BUILDING_APPS.md specifies how to write apps that AutoSpace can render: templated apps, media apps, and the app protocol. The document is inherited from upstream and still names Gearslip throughout; its protocol content applies to this fork, and a fork header note at the top of the document says so.
Android, Android Auto, Google Maps, Google Messages, and Waze are trademarks of Google LLC. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB. Gearslip is a project of Twink Software LLC. AutoSpace is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of these companies. All other names belong to their owners.
AutoSpace is based on Gearslip by Twink Software LLC, licensed under AGPL-3.0; see LICENSE. The upstream project's separate commercial licence covers upstream Gearslip only — it does not cover this fork, and buying it buys nothing for AutoSpace. This fork's code and changes are under AGPL-3.0 as well.
In-app credits (Settings → About) name the upstream project, the open-source libraries (Media3, AndroidX including Compose Material 3 and the car-app libraries, and Google Material components, all Apache 2.0), and the voice stack: speech recognition by sherpa-onnx (Apache 2.0), with Kroko ASR by Banafo (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Parakeet and Canary by NVIDIA (CC BY 4.0); spoken voice by Kokoro-82M (Hexgrad, Apache 2.0), with Piper voices (MIT) as fallback, and espeak-ng phonemization (GPL-3.0).