CarPlay in iOS 26
Apple brings much more customization to our in-car displays, mainly by letting the much heralded features of CarPlay Ultra trickle down to regular CarPlay.
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CarPlay has taken on the visual qualities of Liquid Glass. Since CarPlay is essentially a mirror for your iPhone, this is to be expected, but it’s been done in a way that hasn’t created any legibility issues.
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Legibility issues can be further improved with a new Large Text option. Quite simply, it makes text larger system-wide in 100, 110, 120, and 135% increments. While this is good to have, what’s stopped me from increasing my text size is that very implementation: system-wide.
I want to decrease the font size.
Lastly, Smart Display Zoom aims to resize elements of the UI to better fit your car’s screen. It’s unclear how it determines this, and I’ve seen as many people have their UI reduced as have their UI increased in size, which is what happened to me. Unfortunately, this made apps like Maps difficult to use, so I turned it off. It’s certainly worth checking out, but as with mine, you might not get the result you want.
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CarPlay has created a new screen that you can access by swiping right from the multi-view layout. On this screen, you can have either one or two stacks of widgets (depending on your screen size).
This seems cool because it lets you see content from iOS apps that don’t have CarPlay versions.
Nothing but improvements here, particularly the adjustments to UI sizing. More like this, please.
On my particular display size, they got bigger and are much more tappable 😍
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I think Smart Display Zoom is the feature that’s making the most difference for me.
Things on my display got way smaller and there’s way more density it seems.
Oligo Security discovered severe security flaws in Apple’s AirPlay and CarPlay software and Apple’s code embedded in third-party products. Apple eventually patched its own software after Oligo responsibly disclosed the security flaws to the company, but many millions of unpatched Apple devices and third-party devices remain vulnerable to wireless zero-click attacks and more.
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I can’t get the widgets to do anything. The calendar displays the month, but anything nothing else displays or does anything useful.
My Ring camera for example just says the camera name with a picture of the device. No apparent way to get the actual camera view.
The ChatGPT widget has a button for voice mode that, if the screen is unlocked and not in Driving focus, will open the app, and then on a second tap start voice mode.
Is it just me? Has anyone actually done anything useful with the widgets?
And to be clear I don’t mean the new suggestion bubbles on the Home Screen, I’m talking about the feature mentioned above where you swipe to a new screen left of that.
I was happy because one of the default widgets provides weather, which hadn't been (freely) available before.
Is there a way to have it so live activities *don’t* always show up on CarPlay? Not really a fan of that feature.
Smart Zoom makes everything smaller on my 2017 Ford C-Max, which is nice because everything was always too big before.
Most alerts, for example had been useless since around iOS 16 or so, as you had to scroll to see all the options. Only around 1.5 buttons would fit in the alert, so scrolling a Reminders to the "Mark as Completed" button was basically impossible. (It had worked fine in early CarPlay versions, e.g. iOS 10 or 11, but was broken a few years ago.) Now with Smart Zoom enabled, those sorts of things are usable again.
