Android 15 QPR1 introduced a bug requiring the Microphone (record audio) permission for routing local audio too. It impacts Android Auto on both GrapheneOS and stock OS, but only users on GrapheneOS will notice it because the permissions aren’t granted by default.
Our next release will have a fix for this issue to avoid the audio recording permission (Microphone) being needed.
If you need this feature and don’t use the voice features for Android Auto, you can choose if you want to work around it by temporarily granting it this access.
Android 15 QPR1 includes many device-independent privacy/security patches not backported to older Android releases as part of the December 2024 Android Security Bulletin patches we shipped on December 2nd before the stock OS. It also has the monthly Pixel driver/firmware patches.
Since these patches are important, we decided it wouldn’t make sense to delay our release reaching the Stable channel due to this upstream bug. It’s unfortunate Android Auto audio routing will be partially broken by default but there’s a workaround and we’ll fix their bug soon.