Apple, Google want eyes on the road
Feature on iPhone better integrated than Android
Both offer tools to prevent distracted driving.
Giving your phone a rest when you’re driving is always a good call, but the tools Apple and Google offer to help you focus on the road can be easy to miss.
Here’s a reminder of how to use them. Please read it and heed it before you head out for Memorial Day.
On iPhones running the current iOS 11 software, you should have gotten a prompt to enable Apple’s “Do Not Disturb while driving” option the first time your iPhone detected motion akin to driving. But if you ignored that, you should revisit this “do not disturb” feature, which suppresses notifications and only shows turn-by-turn navigation on the lock screen.
In the Settings app, tap “Do Not Disturb” and scroll down to change the feature’s activation options. “Automatically” turns it on if the iPhone’s motion sensors pick up auto-like acceleration (so it will work if you’re in a rented or borrowed car), while “When Connected to Car Bluetooth” relies on the phone pairing to your car’s Bluetooth wireless (which avoids it being confused by noncar movement).
“Manually” requires you to activate do not disturb-while-driving from the Control Center. By default, iOS’ Control Center doesn’t show an icon for this mode. To fix that, go to the Settings app, select “Control Center” and then “Customize Controls.”
At least most iOS users seem to be taking advantage of this help. A study released in February by the Cambridge, Mass., insurance marketplace EverQuote found about 80% of iPhone users with its EverDrive safe-driving app installed were using Apple’s do-not-disturb feature at the start of last fall.
That study did not cover adoption of Google’s Android Auto app, but since that app isn’t installed by default, odds are the figure is lower. This program, not the same as the in-car interface many car manufacturers now ship, has offered drivers a stripped-down front end for Android since 2016.
It’s not as restrictive as Apple’s car- mode feature, since it can play music, lets calls through and will offer to read aloud incoming texts and invite you to voice-dictate replies to them. But it does hide other sources of distraction. No Facebook notifications or interoffice emails will pop up.
You can set Android Auto to launch automatically when your phone connects to your car’s Bluetooth. If your vehicle is Bluetooth-deprived, put this app’s icon right in the center of your phone’s home screen, but be aware that it won’t default to answering calls in speakerphone mode.
There’s no option to have Android Auto launch every time a phone detects a car’s motion, although Google did add an automatic do-not-disturb mode to its Pixel 2 line in November.
Since the next version of Android is already set to include features to curtail your screen time, making Android Auto easier to discover would be a sensible addition to that upcoming release when it ships in the third quarter. Android Auto is a good app, but its 10 million-plus downloads mean it hasn’t even gotten out of the parking lot compared to Google’s Waze traffic-navigation app, which now touts more than 100 million downloads.
And drivers unquestionably need the help. A second EverQuote study, released in April, found 37% of unsafedriving trips recorded by EverDrive involved handheld smartphone use — as in, with no indication from the device’s motion sensors that it was being kept in a dashboard mount.