Android Automotive tells an app when the car requires distraction optimization,
and Plezy never asked. A monitor now watches CarUxRestrictions and publishes the
verdict over the existing platform channel, where a single Dart gate answers
whether playback may start.
The car service is reached through the lifecycle-listener overload rather than
Car.createCar(Context). That overload blocks its caller for up to five seconds
polling ServiceManager, and on car-service death it reaches killClient(), which
kills the hosting process for any context that is not an Activity or a Service -
a crash in a system component would take the app down with it. Head units on
Android 9 and 10 predate the listener, so a legacy ServiceConnection is used
there, with the same identity guard on reconnect.
A vehicle that has not answered yet counts as restricted, and one deadline is
spent resolving it rather than one per request, so a wedged car service delays
playback once instead of on every open.
Plezy declares appCategory="video", so on Android Automotive OS it is a
parked app bound by car app quality DD-2/DD-3: audio must stop when the
vehicle starts driving and must not be resumable while driving. Two paths
kept audio alive. Music playback ran under a mediaPlayback foreground
service whose lifecycle observer was registered for Apple TV only, so it
never paused when Android backgrounded the app. Video pausing hung off
AppLifecycleState.hidden, which Flutter only synthesizes once Android
delivers onStop; a car without the Automotive compatibility mode delivers
onPause alone, which maps to AppLifecycleState.inactive and the player
ignored.
Gate every path that can start audio on a new lifecycle predicate,
automotivePlaybackAllowed, which permits playback on a car only while the
app is resumed and fails closed on an unknown lifecycle state. That covers
explicit play, gapless arming and track transitions, live retry and
channel switch, frame-rate-match resume, VOD/live startup, and the queue
navigation commands of the OS media session, plus a last-resort pause for
when the platform player resumes itself on native audio-focus regain.
Playback authority on the media-session router is deliberately left alone:
the router consumes a denied event, so gating it would swallow PauseEvent
and leave the OS unable to stop audio. Reacting to lifecycle callbacks is
the mechanism the platform documents as sufficient, so no android.car
dependency is added.
The music queue no longer requests POST_NOTIFICATIONS on a car, where the
foreground service and its notification never start: there is nothing to
authorize, and the prompt would take focus and make the gate discard the
first play intent.
Detect the form factor too: FEATURE_AUTOMOTIVE now vetoes the Android TV
verdict, so a rotary-only head unit no longer inherits the leanback
experience. Picture-in-picture is gated on FEATURE_PICTURE_IN_PICTURE,
which cars lack, so the app's UI cannot stay on screen while driving, and
nothing forces a preferred orientation on a fixed-orientation display.
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