SiriusXM Not Working in Your Car: 84 Reviews (2026)

A radio app has one place it has to work, and it is not your desk. It is a car, at 60 miles an hour, with your hands on the wheel and your eyes where they belong. That is the setting almost every serious SiriusXM complaint describes, and it is why the same six problems keep coming back across fourteen months of reviews.

SiriusXM holds 4.51 stars from 1,130,521 Google Play ratings on more than 10 million installs, and 862,697 of those ratings, 76.3% of them, are five stars. On the App Store it holds 4.83 from 3,074,001 ratings. Underneath those numbers is a set of in-car failures that has never gone away, and one that got sharply worse in the last two weeks of August 2026.

Quick Answer: Why Is SiriusXM Not Working in Your Car?

Because the app and the car keep disagreeing about who is in charge. We pulled the 3,000 most recent US Google Play reviews on 1 September 2026, filtered to 697 substantial 1-3 star complaints covering fourteen months, and hand-verified 84 about using the app in a vehicle: 12.1% of every real complaint in the window, and 59.5% of those are one-star. The largest group, 21 reviews, is the app launching itself and taking over the car audio the moment Bluetooth connects. Then 17 about Android Auto refusing to start the app without picking up the phone, 16 about being unable to find a station on the car screen, 13 about steering wheel buttons doing the wrong thing, 12 about on-screen controls that were replaced, and 5 about losing your place. Across those 84 reviews there are 25 different app version labels, so this is not one bad release.

How We Read These Reviews

We pulled the 3,000 most recent US Google Play reviews for SiriusXM on 1 September 2026, along with the live store metadata. The developer is SiriusXM, the build was 7.31.0, updated 17 August 2026, and the listing declares in-app purchases and no advertising.

Those 3,000 reviews cover 1 July 2025 to 31 August 2026, which is 426 days. Of them, 1,217 were 1-3 stars. We kept the ones long enough to describe something, 120 characters or more, which left 697 substantial negative reviews. Fourteen months is a long window for an app corpus, and we use it deliberately here: the question is not what broke this week, it is what has stayed broken.

From that pool we pulled every review mentioning Android Auto, CarPlay, Bluetooth, steering wheel controls, presets, a head unit, or listening in a car or truck. That produced 133 candidates. Reading them one at a time, 49 were about something else. That is a high false positive rate, 36.8%, and the reason is simple: this is a car radio service, so an enormous number of reviewers mention a vehicle while complaining about price, coverage, channel lineups or the content itself. Those are real complaints. They are not this one. What is left is 84 confirmed reviews, each assigned to exactly one category.

The Six Shapes of an In-Car SiriusXM Complaint

Two things are worth saying before the sections. First, 11 of the 84 explicitly frame this as a safety problem, naming hands-free laws, taking their eyes off the road, or the risk of an accident. Second, only one of the 84 names a competing app, which is unusual: these are not people shopping around, they are people who already pay and cannot use what they bought.

1. The App Starts Itself (21 Reviews)

This is the largest group and the oldest. The complaint is always the same shape: the phone connects to a car, a truck head unit or a pair of headphones, and SiriusXM begins playing without being asked, overriding whatever the person actually wanted to hear.

The app just automatically opens and begins playing without my permission when my Bluetooth connects to the car. I have tried to go into its settings and turn off autoplay but there is nothing in my app to turn it off.

Every time I get in my car and I hit my Bluetooth for my media. This app overrides everything, and I have to go in and pause it and close it out. And there are no options to turn that feature off.

The SiriusXM app repeatedly hijacks audio on my phone without consent. When I connect Bluetooth headphones or press play/pause while watching Netflix, YouTube, or listening in my browser, SiriusXM launches in the background and starts playing. I’ve checked all permissions and settings but nothing stops it.

The app keeps launching on my truck radio without being prompted, or opened by me. Why would I want the app on my phone to play when I have it on my vehicle and the feed is love or more up go date in my truck? There is no 'settings' on the app to make this stop.

The detail that turns this from an annoyance into a pattern is what happens when people try to switch it off. Eleven of the 21 explicitly say they could not find a setting, or that the setting they found did not work. One reviewer reports being told by support that the cause was elsewhere.

App overrides any other media when connected to bluetooth. Called tech support only for them to tell me its my android auto or my cars settings. I dont have andriod auto nor do i have any autoplay on the car radio. No other media service autoplays on my radio. Only SiriusXM app .

STOP AUTO-PLAYING!!!!! Despite disabling the auto-playing option in the app and in my car, this App refuses to stop doing it. Fix it SiriusXM or I'm canceling my membership and uninstalling. App and OS updated. So ANNOYING. Why bother putting an option that doesn't work?

the app starts every time i get in my car. i tried to turn it off and couldn't find any settings for that. i googled what to do and saw a checklist of like 8 things i need to do.

Only two measures appear in this corpus as actually stopping it, and neither is a setting. Two reviewers report that signing out of the account works. Four describe removing the app, one of them on a rolling basis.

I have to install this app every time I use it and uninstall it when I am finished, because if I don't, it will start playing every time my phone connects to a bluetooth device.

If I force close the SiriusXM app, IT SHOULD STAY CLOSED!! I do NOT want it to open again when I connect my Bluetooth unless I directly open the SiriusXM app, myself!!!

1 yr+ of the app randomly launching on Bluetooth. Even better, if you switch away or close it too many times, you lose your place in the middle of a show. Support DOES NOT know how to fix this, scripted replies are worthless.

The span matters as much as the count. These 21 reviews run from 29 July 2025 to 27 August 2026 and carry 13 different version labels, the oldest of them 6.7.0. Whatever this is, it survived more than a year of releases.

2. Steering Wheel Buttons Do the Wrong Thing (13 Reviews)

SiriusXM has a setting that decides what the physical next and previous buttons on your steering wheel do: step through your saved favorites, or step through the full channel lineup one number at a time. Thirteen reviewers say the wrong one is happening.

Love the app because it gives me way more Hip-Hop/R&B stations than my car presets. But why can't I use my steering wheel or hands-free controls to switch through Favorites stations only? Having to look at my phone to change stations defeats the purpose of hands-free.

hot garbage. terrible to use through Android Auto. no real way to go through favorite channels via steering wheel controls.

I love Siriusxm but am having persistent issues with the Android Auto app. I have the channel buttons set to scroll my favorites list, but it continues to scroll all the stations numerically. If I go to the setting page, that setting is selected, and it will start working if I select it again.

Five of the 13 describe the same underlying failure, which is not that the setting is wrong but that it does not stay set.

I appreciate the ability to use the steering wheel buttons to go to my next preset channel, however a bug in the app causes the setting to revert back to going to the next channel in the whole lineup (going from channel 5 to channel 6, instead of preset to preset).

I still have the Android auto bug. in settings I will put the next saved channel setting and it will only stick until the app is turned off. Once you turn the app back on or if it's restarted in the car you would have to go back into the settings on the app on the physical phone

This is the one place in the corpus where a specific release looks responsible. Version 7.31.0 shipped on 17 August 2026. In the fifteen days from that date to the end of our window there were 34 substantial negative reviews, and 5 of them are steering wheel complaints, 14.7%, against 1.9% across the whole fourteen months. Four of the five carry the 7.31.0 label. We are reading a small sample here and we will say so plainly, but the reviews themselves are unusually direct about the cause, and one of them tested it.

Steering wheel controls no longer goto next saved station on Android Auto. app useless in vehicles now. Back to my music streaming app. I already tied siggestions of clearing cache, no VPN, and disconnect/reconnect phone. How do you break a feature that has worked for many months?!?

Until recently you could use your vehicles controls to advance or go back to your 'favorite' stations located in your 'LIBRARY' via Android Auto or Apple Car play. Now when you advance you have to scroll through Sirius xms 425 stations one at a time instead of your favorites while using Android auto.

APP was working fine on Android Auto and changing my favorite stations using the steering wheel controls on my 2026 Tacoma. But with this new update 7.31.0 the controls doesn't work anymore. Had to delete app and install an older version 7.30.0 and now is the steering wheel controls are working again.

That last review is the closest thing to a controlled experiment a review corpus ever produces: same car, same phone, controls broken on the new build, working again on the old one.

3. The On-Screen Controls Were Replaced (12 Reviews)

A separate group, and an older one. These reviewers are not complaining that a control is broken. They are complaining that a control they used was taken away and replaced with a different one, specifically that the skip forward and skip back buttons on the Android Auto screen became channel change buttons.

The new button layout is absolutely useless on Android Auto. Instead of track forward and back buttons, you can now only change the channel. Honestly, who is channel surfing on Sirius XM? It's like you guys don't even test things out first.

This new version, 7.21.1, has apparently totally screwed up the "skip segment" option in Android Auto! They still work on the phone, but in your auto they've changed it to "next channel". Why did you break this?!

The new button layout for Android auto is terrible. Please 🙏 bring back the rewind/forward 15 second buttons for us talk radio listeners. Using two button slots to change the channel seems unnecessary and shouldnt be on the primary screen.

3 clicks on Android Auto to jump 15 seconds was bad, but to take it away completely... booo! Channel Skip instead of segment skip now? Booo! losing its place after a short pause? booo! pressing play from pause automatically jumps a few minutes? boooo!

Two of these reviews explain why a 15 second skip matters more in a car than it looks on paper: it is how talk radio and podcast listeners get past a segment without touching the phone.

latest update 8/2025 you can rewind to list to the beginning of say a news hour. on Android Auto, the app won't let me fast forward or rewind. I have to physically unlock my phone & have it ffwd or rwd with the 15sec buttons to re-listen or skip through commercials.

app was good until the latest update. took away the skip buttons and replaced them with channel change. makes it a pain to use on android auto. the suggestions always start with stern.

4. Android Auto Will Not Start the App (17 Reviews)

The second largest group. Here the app is not misbehaving on screen, it simply will not come to life on the car display until the driver unlocks the phone and opens it by hand, which is the exact thing the car display exists to avoid.

This app is worthless using Android Auto. It never opens without using your phone - everything else just opens from the screen. There is no way to pull up your saved programs or stations without using your phone.

The app has errors a lot of the time when it tries to connect to android auto. I have to unlock my phone and open the app on the phone so that it can actually work. There has to be a way to fix this so that it never happens.

Daily problems with Android especially with Android Auto. Every time I get in the car I have to open the app on my phone and hit retry.

Horrible for Android Auto. If I switch to this app on Android Auto, 75% of the time I have to open the app to get to a radio station. My state is going 100% hands free on 9/1/25 to the point of if your phone is in your hand you can get a ticket. please fix it.

Others describe a hard error rather than a blank screen.

Terrible interface with Android Auto! Constantly get "Playback Failed" errors with 3 different phones (2 Pixels & 1 Motorola). Come on SiriusXM, FIX THIS!

Your latest update messed everything up. Now, every time I'm in the car, I can change the channel twice or maybe three times. The next time I change the channel, the app freezes and locks out my control of Android Auto. The only way I can fix it is by turning the whole freaking car off and on again. So not cool.

One reviewer puts the safety argument in the plainest possible terms, and this is where the 11 safety mentions in the corpus concentrate.

This app in Android Auto is useless. Unless I go into the app and start playing music then I can see what is currently playing and that is all. this is an issue because many states now have a law where you can't even touch your phone.

5. You Cannot Find a Station on the Car Screen (16 Reviews)

Sixteen reviewers can get the app running and still cannot reach the channel they want. The complaint splits two ways. The first is a scrolling failure that several people describe in almost identical language: the list jumps back to the top before a selection can be made.

XM app is fine on the phone but is limited & frustrating when using Android Auto. Specifically when you try to scroll through the channel list (incl fav channels) the screen will ato scroll back to the top before you can even press select. Awful.

Why does scrolling through Android Auto always become an issue? For the umpteenth time, when I try to view all the channels through Android Auto it keeps scrolling back to the top! This is a continous issue between you and Android Auto.

On my old car it worked fine, but now driving a car with Android Auto and this app is terrible. it'll play if you leave it alone. but if you try to scroll through your library on your cars lcd screen, it jumps back to the top of the list after every other swipe.

The second is that the saved library either does not appear on the car screen at all, or appears with only part of it.

No matter how many times I try, Android Auto will not show the Library (favorite) stations on my car screen. I have cleared cache, force stopped, reinstalled amongst other things and there does not seem to be an answer.

last couple of updates have not addressed allowing more than 6 favorites (library) shown on android auto screen and not showing extra channels showing in library screen. Please fix so I can have more options on android auto screen and not use phone to select these.

For Android Auto, this app is pratically unusable. Does not launch with any stations even though they are saved in my library. i have to vlice command a station just to see something i can select. station tiles also jump around unscreen so scrolling is totally non fumctional.

One reviewer describes the layout itself as the hazard, which is a different and more specific claim than the app being slow.

The interface with Android Auto is dangerous to road safety. The stations show up as oversized buttons. I have to scroll through several pages with only 3 buttons on them to find a desired station. There are often repeats too. This takes your eyes off the road much too long to find a station.

6. It Forgets Where You Were (5 Reviews)

The smallest group, and the one that costs the least per incident and the most over a commute. Five reviewers say the app loses its position when the phone hands off between Bluetooth, Android Auto and everything else, dropping them back to live or to the start of a show.

For over a year now, the Android Auto UI for this continues to be extremely frustrating, especially regarding playback position in a show. More often than not, whether listening live or to an on-demand show, the app completely forgets where I was in the timeline.

This app alone is reason not to subscribe! It never remembers where you left off, the next song function goes to the middle of the next song (and then you only get 1 or 2 rewinds), and if you are mid-way through a show it starts over again the next time that you get in the car.

Useless for live listening. if you pause live audio and do anything with Bluetooth or wifi it skips to live and you lose your place. like EVERY time. may as well wait for the podcast version of episodes vs paying for sirius to listen live.

This Is Not One Bad Update

It would be convenient to blame a release, and for section 2 we partly do. For the corpus as a whole the data does not allow it. The 84 confirmed reviews carry 25 different version labels, plus seven with no label at all, and the largest single bucket, 7.22.1, accounts for eight of them. The autoplay complaint alone spans thirteen labels and more than a year.

What the corpus does show is a rising share. These are shares of each month's substantial negative reviews, not raw counts, so a quiet month and a busy month can be compared.

The monthly denominators here run between 25 and 84 reviews, so any single month is noisy and we are not going to read a trend line into six of them. The claim we will make is narrower and survives the noise: the two most recent months in the window are the two highest, and August is the highest of the fourteen.

The Complaint We Did Not Go Looking For

We went into this corpus looking for in-car failures. The word cancel appears in 133 of the 697 substantial negatives, and most of those are people announcing that they are leaving, which is ordinary. But the ones that describe the cancellation process itself rather than the decision turned out to be a second theme large enough to need its own corpus, so we gave it one: [why SiriusXM subscribers say they cannot cancel](/blog/siriusxm-cant-cancel-subscription-still-charged-reviews-2026), 61 hand-verified reviews, 91.8% of them one-star. If that is what brought you here, start there, or go straight to the SiriusXM cancellation guide for the store-level steps.

What Is Not in This Corpus

No international section, and that is the expected result rather than a finding. We scanned 40 Google Play storefronts. Twenty six of them returned nothing we had not already collected, for two different reasons. Nine returned no reviews at all, because the service is not sold there: Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, Israel, Greece and Czechia. The other seventeen returned reviews we already had, and that includes every English store: Britain, Australia, Canada and India each returned 200 reviews of which 199 were already in the US corpus. The remaining stores produced only 36 substantial negative reviews in total, and exactly one of them describes an in-car problem. SiriusXM is a North American service and the review corpus reflects that.

It would've been 5 stars if the app would auto continue again after you get back in the car using android auto. Now streaming stops almost every time android auto starts again.

Step 1: Check What Your Steering Wheel Buttons Are Set To

Open the app on the phone, go into settings and find the Android Auto control option. Two reviewers in this corpus report that the setting was already correct and still did not work, and five report that it reverts on its own, so the useful move is not to set it once. It is to check it, then check it again after the next app update, because that is where five reviewers say it silently changed back.

Step 2: Launch the App on the Phone Before You Plug In

Ten reviewers arrived at the same workaround independently: open SiriusXM on the phone and start something playing before connecting to the car, rather than trying to start it from the car screen. Nobody in this corpus is happy about it and it defeats the point of a car display, but it is the single most commonly reported thing that gets audio playing.

Step 3: Deal With the App Taking Over Your Car Audio

If the app starts itself when you connect, the corpus is blunt about what does not work. Eleven reviewers could not find a setting, and one reports disabling every permission with no effect. The two measures reviewers say actually stopped it are signing out of the account when you are not listening, and removing the app between uses. Before either, check your car head unit and your phone for their own Bluetooth autoplay settings, because one reviewer was told by support that the car was the cause and confirmed it was not.

Step 4: Find Out Which Version You Are On Before You Blame Yourself

If your steering wheel controls stopped working in late August 2026, note the build number in the Play Store listing. Five reviewers reported this in the fifteen days after 7.31.0 shipped, one of them confirmed the controls worked again on 7.30.0, and another confirmed the same behavior on an iPhone, which rules out your specific phone. Knowing you are looking at a release change rather than a broken setting saves the hour you would otherwise spend clearing caches: four reviewers here report having already cleared the cache, force stopped or reinstalled before writing.

Step 5: Report the Car, the Phone and the Build Number Together

Several reviewers here describe replies that read as scripted and did not fit the problem. The reviews that got somewhere are the ones that named a specific vehicle, a specific phone, a specific app version and a specific button. If you contact support, give them all four in the first message, because the reviews in this corpus that received generic advice are the ones that only described the symptom.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for SiriusXM on Android and SiriusXM on iOS, or go straight to the trust check, the cancellation guide and apps like it. For how the big music services compare on complaint volume, see Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon and Tidal Ranked and what music streaming reviews actually say. For the closest thing to this story in another vehicle app, see what the Waze update broke on CarPlay. For a wearable that fails the same way at the handoff, see Garmin Connect and the sync that stops. For the pattern behind complaints like these, see why users uninstall apps.