A third-party Android app for Emby called liquidWave is still recruiting beta testers, and its latest release, beta.43, concentrates almost entirely on Android Auto. The developer says the in-car experience previously consisted of plain text lists; it now uses artwork tiles spread across four tabs. Home shows Continue listening and Jump back in, followed by the Sonic Mixes. Stations lists the radios and gives every decade from the 60s to the 20s its own tile. Library covers Albums, Artists and Playlists, and Audiobooks has a Continue listening row so you can pick up a book in one tap.
Beyond Android Auto, the app is positioned as a full music and audiobook player. The music side includes crossfade that skips silent intros and outros, a 10-band EQ, offline downloads, Google Cast, a home-screen widget and volume normalization. Audiobooks get chapter-aware resume that returns to the right chapter and position even offline, variable speed, a sleep timer and offline downloads. A browser web app covers non-Android devices.
Setup is deliberately light: you point the app at your Emby server and have a working player in about five minutes, with no plugin required. The fuller feature set needs a one-time setup of the liquidWave Emby plugin and a small companion service, which analyzes the library once to learn how each track actually sounds rather than relying on genre tags. That unlocks Sonic Mixes, Track Radio and Similar, Sonic Adventure journeys between two tracks, and an Artist Mix Creator. New music is analyzed automatically as it is added, and the developer states there is no account, cloud, ads or telemetry, with everything running on your own hardware.
The developer has been running it on a personal library for four to five months and is asking testers to install it from Google Play, use it on their own library for a couple of weeks and report what is broken, confusing or missing. Android Auto users on any head unit are especially wanted, since screen sizes vary and tiles may be cut off or too small, along with audiobook listeners and people with large libraries of 50k+ tracks. Feedback is requested in the forum thread.
Commentary
Music and audiobooks are the part of Emby that third-party clients have historically served least well, so a dedicated player is welcome. The Android Auto rebuild matters more than it sounds: a head unit is a hostile place for a text list, and tile-based navigation with a Continue listening row is the right direction for both albums and part-read books.
The architecture is also the reassuring part. The base app needs nothing but your server address, and the optional analysis runs locally with no account or cloud dependency, which is what most self-hosters want to hear before installing anything. If you already run Emby at home, this is a low-risk beta to try on your own library, and reports from unusual head-unit screen sizes are exactly what the developer is short of. If you would rather keep your media stack inside our own add-ons, our Emby plugin range is a good place to start.