This app was mentioned in 4 comments, with an average of 1.00 upvote
Hey there! Thanks for contributing to the project!
There is this interesting App which provides a widget where you can add direct dial shortcuts - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.car.home.free
I like Car Widget (Pro).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.car.home.free
Because it functions as a glorified Widget all you are really doing is launching apps from the homescreen. The beauty of the widget though is that ~~it has event triggers and is customizable unlike AA or other car mode apps~~. This enables you to theme it in such a manner that it looks like a traditional nav system on your homescreen, live wallpaper and everything. The problem with AA right now is that certain functions exit the app, which is bad for continuity. For instance if you tell it to launch a music app it exits Automate, launches the music app, and then you have to return back to automate for it to read information from the music app. This also prevents it from interfacing with the music app effectively. All you can do is play/pause/skip. You cant access your playlists or search for artists.
The navigation is particularly odd. It appears as though automate is able to hook the google maps process to display their own version of navigation queue's. Aside from taking forever to actually pull up a destination, Automate's nav feature is also a bit disjointed. It exits the app, executes the query in google maps, then returns back to Automate but displays the nav in a birdseye view that doesnt read very well. I
This is handy for my car usage https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.car.home.free