Some Phones Could Soon Lose Android Auto Support – Here's How To Know If Yours Is One

Have you been using an old Android smartphone with Android Auto in your car? If yes, now would be a good time to check the version of Android that the phone is running. More than a year ago — in July 2024 — Google updated the minimum software requirements for phones to run Android Auto. It mandated that phones running software versions below Android 9 will lose functionality with Android Auto. While the announcement did cause alarm bells to ring for people using older smartphones, Google never actually went on to enforce that mandate for well over a year. Fast forward to October 2025, and multiple sources report that Google has finally begun the process of enforcing this minimum requirements mandate.

Google recently released a new beta version of Android Auto 15.5, which removes support for Android smartphones running Android 8 or earlier. Essentially, this means that if you are on an older Android Auto version with an old Android 8-toting smartphone, updating to the latest beta version of the software would essentially cause Android Auto to stop working. Interestingly, Google — on one of its Android Auto help pages — already indicated that the minimum requirement for Android phones to support new and upcoming versions of Android Auto would be Android 9.0 Pie and above. So it's not like this change is a sudden bolt from the blue.

With the stable channel of Android Auto only moving to Android Auto 15.2 as of October 2025, it will be a while before version 15.5 trickles down to regular Android Auto users. To check whether your old Android phone will be affected by this change, go to Settings -> About Phone and verify whether it is running Android 9 and above.

If you happen to use Android Auto on a daily basis and are worried about the possible changes this update might bring, here are some facts. To begin with, if you are using an Android smartphone running Android 9 or later, rest assured, your phone will continue to run Android Auto normally even after updating to Android Auto 15.5 Beta. On an old phone running Android 8, the changes would only take place if you update the version of Android Auto on that device to the latest version. In some cases, however, Android Auto version updates may happen automatically in the background, and users may not even realize that an update has been automatically applied.

Nevertheless, given that Android Auto has only recently updated to version 15.2, and that version 15.5 is still in beta, it would be a while before Android 8 smartphone users may begin to notice this change. If that weren't all, with around 1% of global Android users still running an Android 8 device, only a small subset of users would be affected by this change.

If you are among this minority, the only two options ahead of you are either to consciously choose not to update to Android Auto 15.5 — which we do not recommend — or to simply get yourself a new smartphone running a more recent Android version.