While looking for other information on Intellilink, I came across this. In July, I purchased a 2016 GMC Sierra 1500 SLE. A few days later, I took it to the service center and they did the upgrade for me. At first, they wanted to deny that it was available but I showed them the information available on GMC’s own site. They went back and huddled around the computer for a bit and finally agreed to do the work. It took about an hour once they started. I had put in some customization’s prior to having the work done and all of those were wiped so either they replaced the head unit or did a wipe and restore with a firmware upgrade.
Regardless, I do now have both Android Auto and Apple Car Play available. You will have to install Android Auto from the playstore on the phone you want to use. It also helps to have your phone already paired with the trucks Bluetooth. You will also want to spend some time looking at the Android Auto app page in the playstore to see the list of applications that are supported. You will need to install any of the supported apps that you will want to use. Such as Google maps. That needs to be installed before it will work in Android Auto in your truck. Unfortunately, Waze is not yet supported, but it is promised to be coming.
As a side note, they wanted to charge me for the work but the GMC web site helped there too as it is very prominently stated that the upgrade is free.
There are some issues with Android Auto that I’ve noticed. First, you are required to plug your phone in to the USB port (any of the installed ports will work). This does a few things to your phone. First, it automatically turns on Bluetooth, second, it sets your phones home screen to an Android Auto black screen and it changes the screen timeout to 15 seconds (this is annoying personally as when you disconnect, it doesn’t restore your previous timeout). At the same time, there is an icon on your truck display labelled “Projection”. This Icon will automatically change to the Android Auto icon (or Apple Car Play with an iOS device). You will then need to tap the Android Auto icon to get to the screen that lets you access your apps.
By this time, you’ve likely already figured all of this out but I wanted to post in case someone else gets here with a similar question.
Cheers
