CarPlay Spinning Its Wheels
But even against this backdrop, CarPlay increasingly found itself squeezed by a variety of factors: automobile manufacturers who didn’t want to cede control to an outside force, internal Apple forces focusing on the nascent car project, and increased competition from Google, which not only debuted its own Android Auto feature a year after CarPlay, but also made a play for even deeper integration via Android Automotive a few years later. The future of the feature was far from assured.
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Let’s be clear: CarPlay is far from dead. It continues to get new features with every major update to iOS. This year, it gains a few new additions, including a handful of design tweaks, the sound recognition feature for horns, and new accessibility options, including color filters. All features which are nice to have, even if none rise to the level of significant changes.
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So where does this leave CarPlay? It’s ended up in a holding pattern: It’s good enough for most of what it does, but with the potential of next-generation CarPlay waiting in the wings, it’s understandable that the current version isn’t really being pushed forward.
I don’t think users really care about the next-gen stuff. Just focus on the basics. Improve the design of the existing screens. Actually show the full title of the song that’s playing. Show a history in Music. Make muting in Maps one-tap. Add basic features that are missing from the car versions of the built-in apps. Add more built-in apps, like Find My. None of this is blocked by the auto makers.
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For the love of God Apple, just add Multi-touch pinch-to-zoom in Map, most screen support it, Android auto has done if for years
Thankfully, one-tap muting in maps is actually back since the last version already: just tap the top left instructions window while navigating
@Jan Thanks for the tip! Though I don’t understand why the mute should be linked to whether it’s showing the expanded or compact text…
Siri used to be able to mute and unmute maps but it seems to be their favourite feature to keep breaking and fixing on alternate years. They obviously don’t do regression testing on Siri.
I'm with you: the current incarnation of CarPlay is fine, and just needs relatively small adjustments, rather than a revamp like what they're doing. Some that come to mind: don't put direction toasts exactly where the music player buttons appear, fix the Maps sidebar layout for non-huge screens, let the Maps driving mode show more information on adjacent traffic (like why are you taking a weirdly long route today rather than the usual — how much slower is the typical path, exactly? Google Maps gets this right far more often), and in Maps overview (the screen where you choose which route to take) don't ever hide the button to return to driving mode.
