Android Head Unit Reality Check

Pre-purchase evidence checks for aftermarket Android head units.

Live site: https://headunit-reality-check.pages.dev

PROJECT STATUS: FROZEN

• Active development: No
• New cases: No
• Commercial operation: No
• Public website: Kept online
• Maintenance: Breakage/security only

What this is

A small static-site generator plus the rendered reports it produces. Each report takes one real product listing and shows what the listing does not tell you before you pay: actual hardware platform, advertised-vs-real claims, firmware and support path, model-mutation history, and recorded alternatives with observed prices.

Every claim carries a status — OBSERVED, INFERRED, or UNKNOWN — with links to inspectable primary sources. UNKNOWN is treated as a meaningful pre-purchase finding: if a fact cannot be established from recorded evidence, the report says so instead of filling the gap.

The public site contains only the completed public cases (CASE-01, CASE-08). Two further cases (CASE-05, CASE-10) are preserved under internal/ as control artifacts; they were never part of the public scope and are not linked from the public index.

What this is not

• Not a firmware database, repair service, or flashing guide.
• Not an automated arbitrary-listing analyzer — each case is a hand-checked research dossier built from recorded probe datasets.

Historical note

This was an external commercial probe. It validated that useful pre-purchase evidence checks can be produced from recorded research; direct willingness to pay and a durable commercial model remained unproven. It is published as a frozen research artifact.

Frozen production baseline

• Deployed commit: 4b3848987e65f5c90ceed744442a0d668e766445 (4b38489)
• Tag frozen-production-2026-09-19 points to that commit exactly.
• Archival documentation was added after that commit; the production baseline itself is unchanged.

Layout

• src/ — generator (content.py authored pages, datasets.py loaders, render.py renderer, assets/ shared site assets)
• site/ — built public site (deployed to Cloudflare Pages)
• internal/ — internal control artifacts, not part of the public site
• tests/ — unit tests (98; python3 -m unittest discover -s tests, requires the sibling dataset dirs — see build.py)
• qa/ — browser QA suite (77 checks; node qa/browser_qa.cjs, requires Playwright and a built site/)
• scripts/ — manual Cloudflare deploy handoff wizard (no stored creds)
• DIFFERENTIATION_REVIEW.md — per-case differentiation analysis
• build.py — rebuilds site/ and internal/; requires the sibling dataset directories headunit_probe/ and decision_value_probe/, which are the factual authority and are not part of this repository

License

No license file is included; the repository is published as a read-only archival research artifact. Product images under */assets/img/ are third-party manufacturer/retailer photos used solely to identify the products under review.