Everyone now has high expectations that Coolwalk will be online in August as part of the upgrade to version 8.0, despite the fact that there is only one month left until the end of the summer. In the meanwhile, though, a post published by user ahmadravat on reddit has provided access to further details on the work that Google has been making behind closed doors regarding Coolwalk.
{Root only – for now} Coolwalk Interface Pre-Release Update from AndroidAuto
It seems that when Coolwalk is enabled on a rooted device, it now runs more smoothly on devices with lower screen sizes. A picture has been provided that illustrates how the improved experience would be shown on a device with such a display. With Coolwalk, users are able to run many programs concurrently on the same screen, regardless of the size of that screen, by making use of dedicated cards. This was a design goal from the very beginning.
Because of this, Coolwalk makes it feasible to have critical Android Auto programs, such as navigation app, media players, and phone conversations, on a single display, although the display is little more than 7 inches in size. The technique that Coolwalk takes was inspired by the CarPlay dashboard.
At this moment, it seems as if the navigational line at the bottom is only available in black, and it is not possible to change its visual style to one more appropriate for the daytime. It is not quite clear if Google intends to introduce such a setting when Coolwalk is ready to be launched or whether the bar will just continue to be black in appearance.
And last but not least, it seems that app support for the card-based user interface (UI) will continue to be quite restricted. This is due to the fact that not all developers have upgraded their software in anticipation for the launch of Coolwalk. In point of fact, it seems that not even Google is in a hurry to carry out this action. There is no support for the Coolwalk interface built into Waze, which is despite the fact that it is presently one of the most used navigation applications for Android Auto.
