Your Android headunit has WiFi for connectivity. Ideal for streaming Spotify, YouTube, or even Google Maps, it gets better with a data connection. The WiFi can connect to your home WiFi router, but this is only useful while your car is parked outside your house or apartment. The WiFi signal is too weak to reach down the street, so setting your phone as a WiFi hotspot is the solution.
Hot Spot
A hotspot turns your phone into a WiFi router that can connect to your Android headunit. Your phone’s 3G/LTE/4G/5G data is passed to the WiFi and then sent to the Android headunit. This system will continue to supply the Android headunit with data as long as the phone can get a good data signal. You can now stream and browse as you drive, knowing the Android headunit gets data via the phone.
Problem
The biggest problem, or at least an inconvenience, is setting up the hotspot on your Android phone each time. Android evolves with each version, and improvements are made, but the hotspot has not changed much. After leaving the car, you can find that your Android phone reverts to normal WiFi and drops its hotspot mode. This is useful to allow the phone WiFi to connect to a source (for example, your home WiFi), but it means you must enable ‘hot spot’ mode the next time you get in the car. This can be time-consuming, and it becomes a problem if you forget.
The solution
Having the phone hotspot activate automatically when the phone and Android headunit get close would be a great solution to the problem.
An app called ‘HotSpot Automatic (free)’ will do just that. You install the app on your Android phone, and when configured, it can use Bluetooth to detect and run the hotspot script. The Android headunit will now connect automatically to the phone hotspot.
The APP
The Hotspot Automatic app has a list of tested devices that can be found under the link: https://android-hotspot.de/en/1300-2/
The app launches the hotspot on your phone when the matching Android Headunit Bluetooth device is nearby.
The function can be switched on and off.
No annoying menus. Everything is visible on one page.
Differences between the Pro and Free versions
free: Works with only 3 Bluetooth devices
Pro: Works with unlimited Bluetooth devices
Don’t like Hotspot Automatic?
There are other options on the play store for automatic hotspot activation for your Android headunit and Android phone.
Hot Spot Starter Free is another option to complete the same task as Hotspot Automatic.
Features of the free version are:
Automatically starts WiFi hot spot when connecting to a Bluetooth device
WiFi state will always be restored automatically after Bluetooth disconnect
These are the basic features you will need to automatically start an Android phone hotspot for a data connection to your Android headunit.
The paid version expands on these features to include:
Start selected Apps with the hot spot (basically means start specific apps like radar warners every time you enter your car and Bluetooth connects to the handsfree unit)
Several setup options like shutdown Bluetooth at disconnect and selecting specific Bluetooth devices only.
Job complete
With any of these options installed on your Android phone, it will allow the automatic creation of a data hotspot for your Android headunit each time it boots up.
A note about Free
Free is good, even to test that it works and functions on your phone. As with all the free app offerings, the app developers would like you to pay a small sum for the paid version, and it helps them pay the bills and encourages them to continue developing.
