Drive Keyboard

IMPORTANT
Development of this app has stopped. If you have any issues, I'm afraid these will not be fixed. I don't have Android unit in my car since 2021, and since then dozens of new devices running all kinds of firmware have hit the market. This makes it impossible for me to actively work on the app and implement features/fixes. Please see the list of compatible units below. If yours is not there, the app allows you to remap some buttons and try, but I cannot guarantee it will work.


Drive keyboard was developed to help with keyboard inputs on automotive Android headunits. It supports rotary controller found in many modern cars allowing for character input without the need for touching the screen or in a conventional way with QWERTY style keyboard and touch inputs.

📟Supported hardware:
Please note that this keyboard has been tested on Snapdragon 625, Snapdragon 662/665 and MTK 8227L Android Head Units with system wide support for the controller.

Keyboard will not run correctly on any smartphone or tablet as it requires DPAD inputs (or rotary knob inputs) to work. It was designed to run in landscape mode on 1280x480 and 1920x720 screens. Other resolutions are untested at the moment.

✔Supported keyboard layouts:
1. Rotary and Touch keyboards: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew layouts
2. Touch keyboard: QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY

💬Supported app languages:
Croatian
Dutch
English
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Polish
Romanian
Slovenian
Spanish
Russian

👨‍💻Discord Support Chat: https://discord.gg/fddgDn8

❗ISSUES
1. The keyboard not being saved as the default one.
This is due to a poor memory management of some Chinese Android units (mainly KSW firmware). Any app that is not part of the stock package will be killed off instantly if memory usage passes some arbitrary threshold (set very low for some unknown reason). Users are advised to remove any battery restrictions from the Drive Keyboard app, allowing the app to run in unrestricted mode.
2. The keyboard is not visible but still accepts inputs from the controller.
This is a bug introduced with KSW firmware based on Android 13. Chinese developers artificially changed display metrics of these screens (DPI and more) on all Android 13 based firmware versions. That completely breaks Drive Keyboard's function of calculating keyboard's position on the screen. Please update to the latest version that addresses that issue.

🌍TomTom Navigation Issue
The TomTom navigation app is not supported by the rotary keyboard. Due to how Chinese Android Head Units process knob presses and the fact that the TomTom navigation app overrides the ENTER key, the keyboard in rotary mode cannot function correctly and is being shut down. The keyboard relies on the ENTER key event for processing inputs. Touch mode is unaffected. There is no fix coming as this issue is with TomTom and not with our keyboard.