Add Android Auto to your car.

These days, most new cars include wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Support for wireless connectivity eliminates the need to fiddle with cables, which is always welcome. Luxury cars also come equipped with wireless charging pads in their center consoles, allowing you to simply place your phone on it and start driving. But what if you have an older car that doesn’t have any of these features? Are you stuck with cables forever? Thankfully, you’re not. That’s where devices like the AAWireless TWO come in handy.

As the name suggests, this is the successor to the original AAWireless, which was launched around four years ago. It’s always nice to see some notable upgrades and a slight drop in price. But what I care about is whether it works or not. Will it work the same way as when you connect your phone to your car with a cable? And will it work as well as cars that have wireless Android Auto built-in natively?

To answer these questions, I’ve given you early access to AAWireless TWO. My experience was like this!

If you’ve used the original AAWireless (or any other wireless Android Auto dongle), you’ll feel right at home with AAWireless TWO. There are only two major differences when compared to the original. First, the device itself has been redesigned to be smaller, sleeker, and more visually appealing. This won’t matter much to most people, as you’ll likely be hiding the dongle somewhere in the center console anyway. However, it’s good news for those in vehicles that don’t have hidden USB ports. The second change is the addition of a multi-function button on the dongle itself. Equipped with an RGB LED ring, it lights up in different colors depending on the situation.

I found setting up AAWireless TWO to be easy. First, I downloaded the AAWireless app. I then connected the dongle to my car and pressed the multi-function button for about 2 seconds to put it into pairing mode. When the ring turned purple, it was displayed in the app. Select it, pair it and…that was it. It was incredibly easy. The app doesn’t even require a login.

As soon as I connected, my phone’s app appeared on the car’s infotainment screen. Now that you have completed the pairing process, your phone will automatically pair to AAWireless TWO every time you get into your car. No more fiddling with cables.

There are some settings you can tweak in the app if you want. You can change your country (country-specific network settings apply), have more control over the dongle on your head unit (may be required for certain vehicle makes and models), or turn off the auto-connect feature. (useful in the following cases): Your car’s USB ports are always on. This allows it to go through the head unit first, making the connection more reliable). However, I didn’t have to change any of these standard settings on my car. It worked.

I own a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek. Wired Android Auto is supported, but there is no native wireless support. Previously, I used a similar device (Motorola MA1) to add wireless connectivity, but I was so disappointed with the lack of reliability that I abandoned it. I say this to explain that I went into this review of AAWireless TWO with some concerns about how well it would perform.

Thankfully, I was immediately impressed by how simple and effective this device is, especially compared to the MA1. Setup was quick and easy, and once connected, everything worked very well.

Additionally, I connected my partner’s phone to AAWireless TWO. To do so, I turned off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on my phone, pressed the multifunction button on the dongle for 2 seconds, and then connected to it using her phone (which had the AAWireless app installed) . Once done, you can now turn the network protocol back on and select which phone to connect to the dongle at any time.

If you have multiple phones paired to the dongle, you can tell it to automatically connect to the last phone you used, or use an ordered list to prioritize connections. I chose the latter system because I almost always drive when we’re together, so I put my phone at the top of the list and put her phone on top of my phone. Because I put it under. Now when I’m in the car, whether with her or alone, it connects with me, but when I’m not in the car, it connects with her. Everyone has different needs, so I’m grateful that AAWireless offers this option.

Thankfully, if neither of the above systems works, you can easily switch between phone-to-phone connections. Once connected, press the multi-function button once to switch the connection to the next available phone on the list. This list can be sorted as desired to create a kind of logic tree. If you are reading this and have a shared vehicle with different drivers, you will definitely appreciate this feature.

One small issue my partner and I are facing with this system is that our car doesn’t have a wireless charging pad, so our phones lose their charge while we travel, whereas using the cable charges them. This means that you can get However, this is fine because you still have the option to connect by cable if either of you prefer. You can also connect it to a non-Android Auto USB port and charge while using AAWireless for Android Auto connectivity, so it doesn’t matter either way.

By now you’re probably thinking at least one or two things went wrong. Yes, that’s right!

No perfect device exists. I’m very happy with AAWireless TWO, but the company could tweak a few things.

One issue I quickly noticed was that the audio would cut out when Google Maps navigation instructions played over music. Most people reading this are familiar with how this works. The music volume will temporarily decrease, Google Maps Assistant will read the next navigation instruction, and then the music volume will increase again. My problem was that when this happened, the music at low volume would cut out noticeably, which was very annoying.

After doing a little research, I discovered that the AAWireless app actually has a way to fix this issue. Settings > Advanced Settings > Audio choppiness fix. When I set this setting to “Unlimited”, all the audio interruptions disappeared. I asked AAWireless why this setting was buried, and why it wasn’t set to “unlimited” to begin with, and they said it has something to do with the buffer size that Android Auto automatically sets. did. The “Correct audio choppiness” setting is there as a last resort if Android Auto cannot do this properly. The company doesn’t want to interfere with how Android Auto works unless it really needs to, so this setting is turned off unless you turn it on.

Another issue I ran into was how the app would identify paired devices. My partner and I have the same phone, a Google Pixel 9 Pro, and both appear in the list with the same name (see photo above). There is currently no way to customize these names in the AAWireless app, so as I mentioned earlier, I had to do some trial and error to figure out which ones kept them in the correct order. I asked AAWireless about this and they said that you can work around this issue by disconnecting the phone, renaming it to a unique name within its respective Android settings, and then reconnecting, which apparently It’s much less convenient than customizing the name. within the app. Hopefully enough users will complain about this and AAWireless will add this feature at some point.

Finally, the most inconvenient thing about AAWireless TWO is that it takes a long time to connect. My partner and I actually took a time out on this. It took me 15 seconds to get in the car, turn on the ignition, connect my phone, and see Android Auto appear on the dashboard. The same steps, but without the phone connected and waiting for AAWireless to process, took more than twice as long. Granted, 32 seconds is not a problem. tons It does take some time, but it’s much more time-consuming than taking the cable route. If you’re the type of driver who’s impatient, or the type of driver who won’t leave a parking spot until the navigation instructions work, you might be better off sticking with cable than making the jump to wireless. It didn’t time out, but I’ve previously accessed cars with native wireless Android Auto, and connecting to those cars took less than 32 seconds. In other words, this is an AAAWireless issue, not a phone issue.

Thankfully, all three of these issues could theoretically be fixed or mitigated with future software updates. However, we need to judge the performance of the product at this time, and AAWireless TWO is not perfect out of the box.

I’m happy to have AAWireless TWO on my car. I love that I can jump right in without even having to take my phone out of my pocket, knowing that Android Auto will appear on the screen within 32 seconds. The cables that used to hang all the time in the center console are gone, making the car look cleaner. Riding in your car is now more convenient and you don’t even have to sacrifice the quality of your music or deal with the random shutdowns that happened with previous aftermarket wireless Android Auto dongles.

But the question for you is whether this is worth AAWireless TWO’s asking price of $64.99. Keep in mind, this is actually $5 cheaper than the original product. That means you can get a better, more feature-rich device for less. To me, this is a very fair price, but you may think differently.

Another thing to remember is that we already know that a sequel to AAWireless TWO is coming soon. Expected to be called AAWireless TWO Plus, it will launch in 2025 and feature Apple CarPlay support, which is not supported on AAWireless TWO. This is important information if you or another member of your household uses an Android smartphone, while a frequent driver of your car uses an iPhone. If that’s the case, I highly recommend waiting for the Plus model so you can have a do-it-all dongle.

However, if you and everyone driving your car use Android smartphones, there’s no need to wait. AAWireless TWO is highly recommended.