MINI cars won’t get Android Auto, for now

The big news this week in the BMW community was the announcement around Android Auto coming to BMW cars. Android Auto in a BMW will be demonstrated live for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 and will be available for customers in 20 countries from July 2020 for all vehicles with BMW Operating System 7.0.

Naturally, MINI owners have started to wonder whether their own cars will be getting the highly coveted Android Auto. We reached out to MINI on the topic. “MINI won’t receive Android Auto functionality at the same time as it was just announced for BMW,” a MINI spokesperson told us. “At this time we don’t have a confirmed timeline of when this functionality may become available on MINI models.”

For now, MINI customers will have to settle for Apple’s CarPlay which has been available in MINI cars since 2017. At the time, MINI announced that the Countryman or Clubman could get optioned with the Apple CarPlay as part of the Wired equipment package. Apple CarPlay enables convenient, wireless integration of the Apple iPhone for the use of numerous functions in the areas of music and communication as well as enabling other apps to be controlled via the operating system of the two MINI models.

Statcounter reports that over the January 2018 to January 2019 period Android made up a massive 74.45% of the sector, with iOS way back on 22.85%. So clearly, there is a significant demand globally for Android Auto and it looks like, that for now, the MINI brand is at least looking at this.

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