nsanderson said:
Samsung just sell you phones that grind to a halt after a year so you buy the next one!
I remember seeing the original specs for the radios and that the 7" non-Nav had Android Auto and Apple Carplay and the 8" Nav only had Carplay.
One thing I got the dealer to do was to update my 2016 SRi Nav to have Android Auto as part of the deal when I bought the car.
To be honest, these latest touch screen 'infotainment' systems seem to have a lot of bugs, just random niggly things but stuff that didn't plague the old push button CD30MP3 units.
I remember updating the firmware on my DVD90 back in the day, this was done via a CD, that was obviously useable MANY times.
The R4.0 and the Navi 900 are standard hardware boxes produced by LG for a lot of different car manufacturers. See it as buying a general purpose computer with processing power, and operating system and some hardware features.
One of those features is Wifi....Basically those 2 units have wifi capability, so it would be fully possible to make the car radio update itself whenever connected to wifi just like your mobile phone, Vauxhall just chose to not include that in the firmware.
From what i have heard the first firmwares for the R4.0 had a wifi menu in the secret menu, later firmwares had a visible wifi menu (That did nothing but connect to your wifi) and the latest firmware had all wifi menu's removed.
Vauxhall purposefully chose to NOT enable the OverTheAir update feature, but instead made it a 2 step process that NEEDED the car to go to vauxhall for updating.
The actual firmware update is just files on a USB thumbdrive. You insert it into the USB socket and turn the ignition to power the radio. It will then detect that update files is on the USB drive and does the update......IF they had made these files available online for anyone to update, that would have been fine with me...This is how many of the first generation of flat screen tv's were updated (As they had no wifi).
But after the update, you must connect vauxhall programming hardware to the car and do the variant coding for the car. If you have updated and not variant coded, the radio will show a chevrolet logo when booting up, the screen will be upside down and the controls will look totally different as it will be for some chevrolet model.
The chevrolet interface does have wifi connectivity menu's and even a "Check for new firmware" menu.....(This does say "Latest firmware installed"even though what i had at that time was not the newest version available...At least for the Vauxhall Astra K).
I am guessing that they might be at a point where they have to do the wifi updates for the french infotainment systems that will be used in the 2020 onwards models of the astra K, as "You have to take the car to the garage and pay for firmware upgrades" probably will not sit well with new car owners.
My guess is that there are 2 reasons they have wanted to do the upgrades in the garages.
1. Extra money...People are forced to pay up if they want dumb bugs fixed.
2. A lot of features in cars today, are controlled by the infotainment system and making upgrading possible via wifi, would possibly open up a new attack vector for "hackers" to be able to send modified firmware files to the radio, that had some of the features they want you to pay for, enabled. (In this context "hackers" should not be seen as someone that wants to control your car, but just someone that wants to have software features they did not pay for, enabled.....Sort of like software pirates hack software to enable software they have not paid for)