A few weeks ago, I put in an offer on one of these generic Android head units that are made for the Prius. 9'' Android 13 Support Carplay 4+32GB Car Radio GPS For Toyota Prius 2010-15 LHD | eBay I've used a couple of cheap Android Auto units in the past - I have a PowerAcoustik with wired AA/CP and I installed an Atoto with wireless AA/CP in my son's 2005 Prius. But I think those were actually Linux units, not Android as this one is. I'm a big fan of volume knobs so I decided to try to get one of those units that has a series of buttons and a knob on each side. They are quite a bit more expensive than the cheapest units. I got one that is supposedly Android 13 and 4+32 GB of memory. I played around with it a bit last night. Seems OK. The included wiring seems to plug right into the Prius, so that's really nice. Except for the radio antenna, which I'm going to need an adapter for - the jack on the head unit is really shallow and I don't think it will work with the stock antenna plug. The volume knobs and buttons actually connect to the main unit through the wiring harness - that's weird. Anyway, I was able to program my steering wheel controls no problem and everything seemed to work fine. The head unit has tabs that fit well to the trim in the Prius, but the screws on the metal case don't mate with the original brackets. I am ordering the Scosche TA2105 mounting kit, just for the brackets. I think it comes with metal brackets. I could have just let the head unit float in the trim piece - maybe people do that? But I want something a little more secure and durable. I also ordered a backup camera off of Aliexpress - it will be here in a couple of weeks. I splurged on a hi-def 1080 model, we'll see how that is. The sound quality seems very heavy on the bass and weak on the treble. There is a 36-band EQ so I am thinking I will be able to tweak it to sound OK. I actually liked the stock sound in my Prius very well. The unit I'm replacing is the basic, non-JBL non touchscreen unit.
Well, I tossed it back together quick because I needed to use the car. Drove with it for a couple of hours and discovered a big irritation: Maps are not switching to Dark Mode. Now, for Android Auto, I believe the switch to dark mode can either be triggered by the phone (time of day) or by the car's illumination. The head unit is getting the illumination info - it dims the display - but it's not switching to Dark Mode maps like it should. You can manually pick Dark Mode from settings, but that is not what I want to do! The weird thing with this problem is I've seen people complain about factory head units doing this as well. In other news - the unit is a Zhangxun 9210B under the hood.
I was a bit disappointed when my stock head unit failed. It cut out with increasing frequency, until it was no more. I was happy with the new Sony head unit, except that it made no use of the stock GPS or the Bluetooth microphone.
So I played around with it a bunch. By using Head Unit Reloaded app, I could kind of get the night mode on maps working. But I found the Zlink app for Android Auto that came on it was a lot more reliable. I'm just going to deal with the night mode. I tried to make brackets out of the Scosche kit, but even then they didn't fit right. That was a waste. It's just held in by clipping to the trim piece. However, it fits well and looks pretty good. I used the EQ to roll off the bass and add a little treble and it sounds just fine now. I don't know how it does crossover or sub level if you use the RCA line outs. Maybe there's an app for that? Overall, I give it a B minus. If you want wireless AA and Carplay with a clean factory look, it's a pretty good choice.
There is a canbus adapter available. I believe it can be used for some of these to show some of the car features. And I believe there are some Android apps like Torque that you can run with an OBD II dongle for engine monitoring. My car just had the base radio unit, so the mpg etc was and is displayed up next to the speedometer.
