Google heavily sanitizes the ecosystem of applications allowed on the official Android Auto Play Store channel, routinely citing driver distraction and safety as the primary reasons for keeping the selection tight. While it makes sense to block native video apps while you are moving, these restrictions become frustrating when you must pull the phone out and use a smaller screen while your EV recharges or while you wait out a downpour at a rest stop. Devices like the CarlinKit 2air utilize their own system configurations that make it significantly easier to maintain stable connections when util
5 Android Auto settings that make a wireless dongle experience truly seamless…Over the last few years, Synology has also removed or restricted several features that enthusiasts and self-hosters relied on. In 2024, the company discontinued Video Station, its built-in media management…
…These power-saver or energy-efficient modes help your device consume the least amount of electrical power. While it might reduce your overall power consumption and prolong battery life on a device…
…It's not that much pain and is a fairly quick process to unlock the phone and fire up the HA app, but having a device dedicated to this task that doesn…
…The only permanent fix is moving to local-first automation, but it requires a painful paradigm shift in how you buy and configure tech. Consumer smart homes like Alexa, Google Home, and…
…Having a full smart home ecosystem online could lead to a chaotic list of tens of devices, where only eight of them are your actual computers and media tablets. The others are…
…It's one of the only mainstream devices that can properly pass through lossless formats like Dolby TrueHD with Atmos and DTS:X from local media. Most other streamers either down-mix…
Dhruv Bhutani May 16, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces…
…much easier to consume your media on all the devices you own. By hosting it on a central device on your network, you can stream to any device in your home (or…
Chandraveer Mathur Apr 2, 2026, 11:31 AM EDT A seasoned mechanical design engineer turned tech reporter and reviewer, Chandraveer brings more than four years of consumer tech journalism experience to the…
…my archived digital media, Calibre-Web has an ebook reader built into it – one that supports .txt, .epub, and .pdf files natively. On paper, that might seem somewhat restrictive, but Calibre-Web…