26 ms·
CarPlay Is Additive
- pluc 3mo ago> I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay. I think you mean addictive.
- tedd4u 3mo agoI hesitate to propose ulterior motives, but given there have been several seemingly obtuse objections to projection from Rivian, perhaps the CEO is concerned that, if Rivian supports projection, it will harm the perception of the value of their software stack? Related, I think they licensed their stack to VW.
- cyberax 3mo agoThey want software subscription income. It's as simple as that.
- MBCook 3mo agoYep. Subscriptions and incentives. Every car I have purchased has satellite radio factory installed. And each time SiriusXM will not shut up about trying to get me to sign up. Over and over. It takes years before they give up. I don’t want it. So why is it in the car? Because they pay Ford and Honda and everyone else to put it there. Why did they both have Spotify? And iHeartRadio? Who even uses that? All sorts of other things. There’s a kickback for every one. But unlike satellite none of them work without a cell connection. And they won’t use your phone. You have to pay the car maker for their overpriced connectivity. That’s what they want you to do. Money money everywhere. But if I use CarPlay or android auto guess who doesn’t get a cut. “People will think our software is bad.” It is, that’s why I want CarPlay.
- bluGill 3mo agoThey want my money. After the car payment I don't have money leftover for another subscription. Use my phone subscription, that is what I'm paying for for.
- MBCook 3mo agoThat’s one of the things that’s always seemed odd to me. I’m more likely to use some service on the car that you get a kick back for and can spy on if I can use my cell phone data plan. If you try to put a gate in front of it of a $25/mo car data plan, forget it. It’s 4G? Wow. My phone is only 5G. It’s a hotspot? So is my phone. And I’m the only one here anyway. I get updates to your maps? I don’t like your maps. It’s like they’re trying to sell flavoring to make dirty water taste better, without ever stopping to think most people don’t like dirty water.
- al_borland 3mo agoAnd your data. Auto makers love selling user data.
- MBCook 3mo agoTBF for a lot of stuff they could probably just monitor the audio system to fingerprint things the way TVs do these days and sell that data even if you use android auto or CarPlay. But they certainly get a lot more if you use their maps and entertainment apps.
- altairprime 3mo agoI think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data. The correct route for someone with interview access to Rivian to clarify whether this scenario applies would be to review their legal terms for owners and then point-blank ask in a recorded interview ‘whether Rivian’s vehicles are reporting to Rivian what music their buyers play in Rivian vehicles’. This is a nuanced sentence: whether is yes/no; information is too broad to weasel out of; ‘on what music’ focuses on a private aspect of car ownership and is a callback to the VHS rental rulings; ‘in their vehicles’ is not only restricted to what’s connected to the headunit by usb or Bluetooth or radio, but also covers the headunit-connected microphones in the vehicle as well. If they say yes, the questions become obvious. If they say no, the followup should be to ask if Rivian contractually guarantees that they will not someday issue a software update that begins doing so. Either it does not, or it does. Two questions max to either confirm or refute a suspicion. GM cited ‘the ability to improve cars’ as why it’s refusing CarPlay, but as the OP article clearly shows, GM could simply continue to improve the cars and the screen surrounding the CarPlay dedicated window, while continuing to improve their own built-in functions using the data from those who do not use it for the benefit of those same users. GM’s justifications last year in this regard are just as obtuse as Rivian’s this year. Given that similarity, I suspect you’re right: Rivian does indeed seem to be trying not to appear desperately in need of cash by reselling user data for subscription revenue profit: ‘buy our three-ton six-figure vehicle so that we can make $1/year off of you to keep our business afloat’ is horrendous optics and would lead to open mockery of their business. * The GM/FTC 2026 case only prevents GM from selling data associated with vehicle driving. Headunit usage cannot be readily assumed to be ‘driving’ data in the case context of vehicle insurers, and so continued sale of radio usage data to (for imaginary example) Nielsen would be unaffected by the specific, narrow, and temporary 2026 ruling.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- drnick1 3mo ago> I think Rivian is disguising a hidden factor: CarPlay prohibits vehicle manufacturers from collecting metrics and selling anonymized or identified user activity data, and this loss of telematics data / income stream is unacceptable to manufacturers (for example, GM*) who see the smart TV business making billions on that precise data. The car's own cellular connection can still report large amounts of telemetry, such as the car's location in real time, how many people are in it, etc. And if modern cars are anything like smart TVs, send "content recognition" screenshots home to infer what drivers use the onboard screen for. I refuse to drive a car without first unplugging the cell modem; this is more or less easy depending on the make and model, so do your research.
- wvenable 3mo ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" -- Upton Sinclair This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary. If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
- bombcar 3mo agoThe car industry got "mogged" as the kids say by Apple - cars went from status items (see any 60s/70s movie) to "an iPhone accessory" overnight and they've still not recovered.
- bombcar 3mo agoI don't think I can honestly say I've seen a car UI done so well I'd forego CarPlay on the same vehicle. MAYBE in the rare case it has wireless CarPlay only, but can play music over USB from my phone. Maybe.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- valgaze 3mo agoAuthor says "I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay." From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro... Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it supported CarPlay. “It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said during a presentation of the new features.
- echelon 3mo agoSounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch. These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins. Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second. Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.
- pertymcpert 3mo agoWhat do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?
- dgacmu 3mo agoConsumers having a preference is not ok? I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.
- al_borland 3mo agoNot just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.
- echelon 3mo ago> Let me help you, [Rivian Chief Software Officer] Wassym Casey Liss, let me help you: Apple and Google are monopolies. You are boot licking an invasive species trillion dollar company. These two megacorps are trying to put their greedy tendrils into the automotive industry and extract even more money from an industry that is not healthy and very difficult to succeed at. It's high time the governments of the world told Google and Apple to fuck off and leave both consumers and other industries alone. Told the both of them that it's time for their platforms to become an open standard. That phones themselves must be an open standards. With open web installs without scare walls and deeply hidden settings. The inversion of control needs to make Apple and Google the bitch here. Not the automotive industry that can't even dream of the insane margins the tech industry has. Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control. People own cars. Not two tech titans.
- retired_account 3mo agoGeez, did Apple CarPlay burn down your house and kill your livestock or something?
- frollogaston 3mo agoNo, that was the original Ford SYNC for Windows Phone
- canthonytucci 3mo ago> Cars should be able to interface with any phone without having to subjugate themselves to Google and Apple. Because this is a perverted inversion of control. Bluetooth?
- frollogaston 3mo agoUm, my favorite feature of CarPlay is that I can just not use it.
- cebert 3mo agoThey want to hold you captive to subscription plans. If they allow CarPlay, it gives consumers more options for cellular connectivity, music, navigation, and other apps.
- symfoniq 3mo agoThat's one of the reasons CarPlay is non-negotiable for me: It limits the automaker's ability to enshittify the ownership experience.
- alex_suzuki 3mo agoNothing prevents them from removing CarPlay in an update, though? Unless you make sure to never connect the car to the internet. Some garages will update FW for you unasked I hear.
- Telaneo 3mo agoThis would not fly in Europe. You would be able to return the car for having lost crucial functionality, at least within 2 years of the sale (in some jurisdictions, 5 years). They could do it after that, but functionally forcing a subscription to get back a worse version of the functionality one already had for free sounds like a bad way to encourage sales of said subscription.
- jrmg 3mo agoRemoving an advertised-at-sale feature in an update wouldn’t fly in the US either.
- asadotzler 3mo agoSony is deleting 551 movies from customer accounts, movies those customers paid for. Nothing digital is ever truly yours. They can and absolutely do take things away after advertising them at sale. This is actually quite common.
- mayoff 3mo agoI’m with Casey on this: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. Of course, I haven’t bought a car since 2013. That one is a Tesla Model S and I think its UI is pretty decent for maps and playing audio, but I have rented enough cars since then to know that I would much prefer CarPlay support. If I had to replace my car today, I’d probably buy a Volvo EX90, which is the electric version of the XC90 Casey talks about.
- mikeryan 3mo agoWhen I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out. 1. Proper Voice Texting 2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data. The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps) I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better. Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV
- MBCook 3mo agoAnd that’s the thing isn’t it? Often the same app is better on CarPlay/android auto than it is in the native UI for the vast majority of cars.
- symfoniq 3mo agoI agree with the author: CarPlay is table stakes for me. Whenever an automaker says a car won't support CarPlay, I mentally cross it off my list. Which is fine, because there are plenty of other viable options.
- emmelaich 3mo agoI love Android Auto but I don't miss it when driving my Tesla because the Tesla has all things I want anyway.
- etothet 3mo agoI owned a Model Y for several years, but, at least in my city, I always felt Tesla’s navigation had pretty poor route selection during busy times of the day - like dorecting me to streets that were notoriously stop and go during rush our when the highway alternative was known to be much quicker.
- reddalo 3mo agoTesla is more of a technology company than a car company, that's why they managed to make a good UX. Classic car makers are not able to make decent UIs. Plus, each car would be different. So I prefer Android Auto: it's always my Android Auto, regardless of which car I'm driving.
- HolyLampshade 3mo agoI think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it. Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction. Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.
- jrmg 3mo agoWe bought a Honda Prologue last year and didn’t even test drive the built-on-the-same-platform GM cars (e.g. the almost-identical Chevy Blazer EV) because they didn’t have CarPlay. People like us have got to be affecting GM’s sales by some measurable amount, right?
- cloin 3mo agoI’m not even that old, but I’d really love to argue to simplify the entire auto infotainment stack. I don’t even need a screen. I just bring my own by magnetically attaching my phone that I’ll use to navigate and Bluetooth music or podcasts. If CarPlay becomes the standard that allows me to not pay for whatever crappy tablet UI automakers are pushing, fine. But that doesn’t make CarPlay a necessity, it just makes it the least bad option.
- crooked-v 3mo agoIt sounds like you want a Slate: https://www.slate.auto/en https://www.slate.auto/en The closest it gets to an infotainment system is a tablet mount.
- artisinal 3mo agoMany European EVs work like that. Fiat, Opel, Citroen have models without even a radio.
- Telaneo 3mo agoA rear camera is mandatory on new cars in the US these days, and it's honestly a good idea to have them either way. This makes a screen a necessity more or less no matter what (I can't see it being implemented with a bring-your-own tablet solution). That doesn't mean they have to ship most of the infotainment system though. They could just leave that hole there for Carplay to fill. But that would be admiring defeat, and we can't have that.
- hparadiz 3mo agoThe rear and mirror cameras being active is one reason I don't like it when my phone is connected to it because they overlay what Carplay/Android Auto is trying to show. It's sort of like downgrading from dual screen to one.
- Telaneo 3mo agoI've never found it to be inconvenient. When I'm reversing, I'm not using Carplay actively. I guess it could be annoying if you're a passenger trying to key in a destination or something, but I'd just use my phone in that case (or have the driver unlock their phone).
- wackget 3mo agoIt's difficult for me to admit - because I really dislike Apple, Google, and the other predatory monopolies - but I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay either. Like I said, it's not because I'm a fan of Apple. Honestly, fuck Apple. Fuck their stupid walled garden and their $99/yr developer fee and their planned obsolesence and their lack of a headphone jack and everything else. But fuck Google too. And especially fuck all the car makers with their crappy infotainment software. The truth is, I put up with an iPhone and with CarPlay simply because it is slightly less shitty than all the other shitty options.
- wackget 3mo agoAs a disclaimer, the three iPhones I've ever purchased have all been used. I keep them for as long as possible. I don't use iCloud. I don't buy apps. In fact, I don't give Apple any money as far as I know. I wish a Linux phone was a viable option but they are years away from being truly usable and decades away from any hope of mass integration with cars.
- jitl 3mo agoandroid isn't linux-y enough to be able to use android auto on a more typical linux kernel?
- flax 3mo agoI don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.
- MBCook 3mo agoEffectively no one does that. I think there might be one or two ultra luxury cars that do, but in general no one does. Because they don’t wanna cut off any of their audience. And at this point it seems like 80% of car manufacturers just ship android automotive anyway. You really think they’re gonna do that and turn off android auto support?
- appden 3mo agoI’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve had Teslas for 8 years and we currently also have car that supports CarPlay. The CarPlay interface is overall far inferior, especially with navigation. First of all, searching for destinations is terrible on CarPlay compared to Tesla! Even worse, Apple didn’t even add multi-touch support to CarPlay until iOS 26, and the vast majority of cars (including ours) don’t support it, so you have to hunt for and tap the zoom controls, which is pretty barbaric compared to the fluid pinch and zoom gestures that work on Tesla and our other devices. Also on our CarPlay car, it never seems to know the direction the car is facing until it starts moving, which becomes incredibly frustrating navigating out of a parking lot. The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back, whereas on Tesla (and Rivian) you can choose and control music while keeping navigation on your screen.
- MBCook 3mo agoOK you don’t like it. How is that an argument against allowing people to choose?
- appden 3mo agoQuite the contrary, I’ve long thought Tesla should add support for CarPlay to alleviate the concerns of many buyers over it not being supported. I think it would have been starkly worse than Tesla’s interface before they supported multi-touch this past year, but nonetheless they should have supported it by now. Better late than never that they’re finally adding support for it, it’ll especially make Rivian look kinda silly for continuing to be so stubborn about it. I think only a small fraction will actually use CarPlay on their Teslas, but it’s still pretty dumb to let that missing feature hurt their sales.
- jitl 3mo agoI have a boring Mercedes mid-size SUV. Carplay works. I can skip/repeat tracks using the standard control on the steering wheel; the instrument cluster shows the current track the same way it's done with connected phones forever. On the center console screen, we use the Carplay view with 3 splits - one for Spotify, two for navigation (map & next direction). Google Maps and Apple Maps are both reliable where I drive (Miami). Tesla is a great car below the from the headlights down, I love driving my dad's Y performance to the grocery store when I'm visiting home. But no way I'm going to get a car where I can't point the vent at my armpit without using a touch screen. No way I'm going to get a car where I can't talk to whatever agent I want while stuck in traffic. I much rather have a boring car that doesn't tick me off. If Tesla (or Rivian) add Carplay, they'll really move up the my list (still want physical vent control tho). Would you stop driving your Tesla if an update added Carplay tomorrow?
- tlogan 3mo agoOver 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
- MBCook 3mo agoThat was the statistic, with GM‘s move to ditch it is that still true? Wasn’t there also some other legacy auto maker that was planning to?
- yostrovs 3mo agoThere are a bunch of CarPlay devices on Amazon, for example, with all kinds of screens, designed for Tesla and other cars that don't support it, that cost about $200 for a nice one. Why not just buy one of those and who cares if it's natively supported?
- rootusrootus 3mo agoIn most cases it puts the CarPlay screen in a more difficult to reach location than the OE screen. The one that interests me now is the one that selectively takes over the Tesla screen.
- MBCook 3mo agoPlus it’s not going to integrate with your steering wheel controls, navigation system, or anything else. Those are a great solution for a car that doesn’t have an infotainment screen. But Teslas, Rivians, and GMs all do. So why should anyone have to do that?
- Telaneo 3mo agoWhy buy a car where you need to do this and get a more janky experience, when you can buy one with it integrated, with no downsides?
- numpad0 3mo ago> There exists a flavor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car. I wish software leaning Internet people stop framing that center console tablet as "the car". It's worse than people pointing at display monitors and calling it computers. They're just cheap complimentary tablets attached to the car. If we were to fully embrace the line of thinking that frame the touchscreen being the car, the Slate Truck cannot exist, since it lacks the car of the car. In reality it does exist, because that thing is just a tiny add-on unit of a car. The reason why there's been zero cars with CarPlay Ultra is because those cheap tablets remote controlling features of the actual car that hosts it, like speedometer, is weird, and way too complicated, and plain unworkable, on top of being too controlling. I'm not defending car brands, I find conversations with misunderstandings like this less than ideally productive. The 5.25" DVD drive unit is not the computer.
- rogerrogerr 3mo agoHuh? Your own quote literally does not frame the center screen as "the car": > that does take over every screen of the car.
- numpad0 3mo agoThe author clearly thinks that the dash and and the nav are connected to the same thing in the back, when in reality the nav is a self contained unit that runs on the power from the car. That only happens when people frame the nav as the car.
- rootusrootus 3mo agoCarPlay Ultra takes over the infotainment as well as the dash displays. The author is correct. In cars that support CarPlay Ultra, the dash screens are just additional infotainment screens that default to gauge display.
- numpad0 3mo agoAnd I'm saying zero cars support CarPlay Ultra because that's not how cars work. The dash screens cannot be made into just additional infotainment screens because the infotainment is explicitly architected as an external device to the car. What I've been saying is that the infotainment is external to the car, not significantly more connected and integrated than the spare tire, and that everyone needs to understand that.
- msy 3mo agoI imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
- MBCook 3mo agoTesla was similar. There was a report years ago about how Apple parking lots were just full of the things. And yet Tesla wouldn’t play ball.
- october8140 3mo agoCarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back. The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- greyface- 3mo ago> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company The dash isn't the manufacturer's property. It's the car owner's.
- rootusrootus 3mo agoI have a Tesla and want CarPlay. What car has this better, newer software that you say I’m unaware of?
- al_borland 3mo ago> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company. This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra, which is still fairly new and hardly any companies have implemented it. That’s not what’s being asked for. > fear thinking the old car software will come back. Why would this not be a concern? Condition forces higher quality. If these car companies are competing against Apple and Google, they need to stop phoning it in. If they block them out, they can ship more junk and drivers are just stuck with it. If they believe it what they ship, they shouldn’t be afraid to also build in CarPlay/Android Auto support. Have the sales people go over the built in system so people give it a chance. Impress the customers with it. Advertise how good it is. Eliminating the competition and claiming it’s for the best, does not inspire confidence.
- MBCook 3mo ago> This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra And Apple doesn’t just take it over. It requires a per-model design package the OEM makes with Apple’s help. So they can keep all their logos and design elements they care about. They still don’t do it, as you pointed out. But it’s not like using an AppleTV to avoid the terrible built in smart TV interface. The OEM is still there.
- josh-wrale 3mo agoDon't like Siri but want CarPlay? oops, nope.
- initramfs 3mo ago"You can read Wassym’s full answer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me: The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users." I kept reading past this part thinking I didn't misread the title, because as he explained, a mirroring solution that takes up every pixel could potentially be addictive, and it made sense that he didn't want the UX to fundamentally change when people drive Rivian's cars. And for that, kudos. But now I realize your case is that CarPlay is additive. Ok, great! I do wish I could use Android on my car, which is newer than your 2017 one but only features Bluetooth, music and Phone, pairing, rather than a full OS mirror. Do I wish it had more? Yes. But am I less distracted on the road? Yes. So I would buy a Rivian.
- commandersaki 3mo agoI don't know about Rivian, but I'm generally less distracted on the road with CarPlay due to Siri & Voice Control. I wish I could extend it to my native car controls such as climate control etc.
- initramfs 3mo agoYeah, I actually use a cell phone mount for navigation since my car doesn't have one. It's far from ideal, and I think more cars should have an easier and more secure way to attach/clamp a phone/tablet rather than require the driver to use their infotainment system, Although that can sometimes be fine. Having a flimsy car mount can be worse/more dangerous than a limited or poorly updated in-car navigation system. https://github.com/hatonthecat/Open-Source-Car/blob/main/ssrn-2837598.pdf https://github.com/hatonthecat/Open-Source-Car/blob/main/ssr...
- artisinal 3mo ago> I'm generally less distracted on the road You should be not distracted at all.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- spaqin 3mo agoAs someone who only had 20+ year old cars and motorcycles, I don't see what's CarPlay supposed to solve? All I need is a Bluetooth-capable radio and a phone holder to display the navigation, so I can listen to my music and focus on driving. Phone doesn't need to be touched unless changing destinations. Do people seriously need to be constantly entertained while driving?
- varenc 3mo agoCarplay isn't about entertainment for me. It's just a vastly superior and convenient way to view the same map you can see on your iPhone.
- intrasight 3mo agoI do see the maps - on my phone. What does seeing them somewhere else add? It seems completely redundant to me.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoThe car screen is much better, for me. Much safer, and less distracting.
- aetch 3mo agoI’d rather have the map shown on the headunit screen rather than have the phone screen next to a larger but unused headunit screen.
- al_borland 3mo agoThe bigger screen is nice. The integration is also nice. I can push a button on my steering wheel to activate Siri to tell it where to go. Music controls on the wheel also pass through to CarPaly. I have a low res auxiliary screen to display added data (oil temp, weather, etc) and the music option will display music track data from CarPlay as well. So instead of trying to look at a tiny screen that’s clipped onto an air vent, I can use the screens and integrated controls, keeping my hands on the wheel and my eyes more in the road. Also, the biggest battery drain is having the screen on. CarPlay allows me to have the screen on the phone off while still accessing all the data. With a wireless adapter, I can also leave the phone in my pocket, so I don’t need to set it up every time I get in the car or remember to grab it when getting out. So it feels more like the native experience of using the car.
- 3lpsy 3mo agoMaybe it’s cause I’ve never actually used it, but I really only care about a stable / well supported Bluetooth connection. I have a holder for my phone for when I use GPS and basically never interact with it directly after it’s set. Only real interactions are media controls via the steering wheel. The only use cases I can see car play helping with are those who take a lot of calls/texts in their car while driving and those who listen to music and want to listen to specific songs.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoI was super bought into carplay and android auto until I actually owned a car that had it. Oh great, it requires USB. Well my phone is 4 years old and the port is toast, so that doesn't work for me. Okay, wireless then. Car doesn't support that. Lovely. Bluetooth implementation is half-assed and the pairing process is Byzantine. Terrific stuff. That car ended up sucking in other ways too. I quickly sold it and went back to buying old Lexuses. Wireless charging phone holder, and off you go. The siren call of infotainment is powerful, but actually living with it is just more fiddly bullshit I don't need in my life.
- russdill 3mo agoIt doesn't negate the problems you are pointing out, but there are several devices that bridge the USB wireless gap. (Aawireless, etc)
- Rekindle8090 3mo ago[dead]
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoThat take is stupid - I tried to use a feature with broken equipment so it must be the feature’s fault it didn’t work.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoI've used it in other cars and the experience just wasn't great. I've had plenty of rentals with Android Auto. Honda is the worst. In two different Hondas, I had to make sure I didn't plug my phone into the blessed USB port to charge, otherwise the wireless AA connection would drop 20 minutes into the drive and I'd have to re-pair manually. And wireless would crap out every hour or so. Mazda was wired-only, which was fine since my phone was new at the time. But Android Auto was clearly not designed for Mazda's otherwise very good non-touchscreen HMI. Both Hyundai/Kias I've rented took a solid 90 seconds to pair every time I got in the car. In a Chevy I rented, it would either pair up instantly and work perfectly or it wouldn't pair at all, depending on the alignment of the stars or something. BMW's implementation worked great, too bad the rest of the controls in a modern BMW are idiotic. And also I can't afford one. I've had several Toyota/Lexus loaner cars. Those worked fine, to my recollection. Maybe I'm cursed, but at this point I don't particularly care. My real, honest-to-god experience with smartphone connectivity in cars is this: the most reliable, user-friendly, brand-agnostic experience is a bluetooth adapter shoved in the cigarette lighter, and a phone holder on the dash.
- mvdtnz 3mo ago> I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay. This is silly. I have installed Android Auto head units into each of my last three cars. It costs a few hundred bucks and takes an afternoon. I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit.
- wvenable 3mo agoI think that ship has sailed, my friend. My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
- duskwuff 3mo ago> I simply will not buy a car that won't easily accept a double DIN head unit. Are those even a thing anymore? The vast majority of new cars have some sort of custom all-in-one dashboard display.
- mvdtnz 3mo agoI don't know or care if "it's a thing anymore", there's an inexhaustible supply of existing cars with double DIN. My Subaru from 2017 has double DIN and I don't see any reason to own a more modern car than that.
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago
- LJGNYC 3mo agoCan anyone recommend a good aftermarket CarPlay unit manufacturer (or stand alone unit that I can mount on dash? Wary of cheating out and getting an overheating cpu or bad touch screen
- simondotau 3mo agoI got a cheap generic one (aphqua brand) and it's fine. The touch screen is fine. The aux out is fine. It doesn't seem to get hot. It's not amazing, but for the price it's functionally perfect.
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo agoRivian should buy overcast. That way they can silence people being too vocal about what they want. The tech way. In all seriousness though, Tesla can’t include CarPlay fast enough to make companies like rivian take a moment and actually consider carplay. Also atp is one of the best podcasts out there
- frollogaston 3mo agoI've never seen CarPlay work properly. 2026 and they still can't make a car play music without jittering like a CD. Every car brand I've rented, every iPhone I've owned, gotta turn that junk off every time.
- monkpit 3mo ago(n=1)
- jhhh 3mo agoJust like the article and every other opinion in this thread...
- frollogaston 3mo agoThis isn't like Linux where the combo of motherboard, kernel version, and day of the week affects your Bluetooth audio, but ok cause n=1. Apple stuff is supposed to just work. Most of it does, but not this.
- MBCook 3mo agoThat’s very odd. I’ve used my phones with 3 different cars regularly using CarPlay every single time I drive for literally a decade without ever experiencing that. Plus various rental cars!
- frollogaston 3mo agoSo I own a new Honda and have either borrowed or rented GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan. If you've only driven say Ford, BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes, VW, I didn't test those.
- MBCook 3mo agoI own a Ford now, had a Honda and I’m in a relative’s Honda somewhat frequently. Rented a number of GMs for sure, maybe a Nissan? Some of that is more fuzzy.
- Loudergood 3mo agoThere should be a standard. (Yes I know the XKCD) Apple and Android each having their own is ridiculous and actively prevents smaller competitors(one can dream)
- MBCook 3mo agoFor what it’s worth I’ve heard they’re basically identical. It’s just some two-way data and an h264 video stream. There’s a reason basically everyone supports both. Seems to be really easy. I don’t know whether the auto makers actually forced them to be compatible or it was a choice in Google’s part to get into cars that already had CarPlay. But it really doesn’t seem like it’s a big hassle. Most of it is probably just certification testing to be allowed to use the names/logos.
- bux93 3mo agoMy car has wired carplay/android auto, but I have a nifty little USB dongle that receives carplay/android auto wirelessly and passes it to the car via USB. Sometimes called an AI box, I think. These things contain a whole System-on-a-Chip board. I presume what it's acting like a middle box; pretending to be the headunit to the phone, and then sending the phone's output to the headunit, pretending to be a phone. Since they need a quite beefy CPU to do that, I'm guessing they don't just pass along packets, but actually speak the protocol on both ends, and perhaps transcode the a/v stream.
- faitswulff 3mo agoSurprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.
- arikrahman 3mo ago[flagged]
- pesfandiar 3mo agoThere are legitimate reasons to get help from LLMs when writing, including being an ESL. The comment has substance.
- ProAm 3mo agoThe author is in a podcast that I classify as Apple apologist. They feel because they have used Apple products for 8+ years the world should bend to their knee. And anytime new non-apple tech comes up on the podcast they do not give any opportunity to acclimate to new tech, because they drink the apple kool-aid. Which is fine, but just admit some products are not for you then if you want the Apple ecosphere, where they dont respect their customers, their developers or their partners.
- outside1234 3mo agoI am also in this camp. As soon as GM announced they weren’t going to support CarPlay, I scratched GM off of the list. Ford Mach E it was then.
- bluGill 3mo agoI thought I would be okay and bought a GM. I regret it because of the lack of android auto.
- al_borland 3mo agoI hope you made your dissatisfaction known. Otherwise I’m sure they see your purchase as a success, validating your decision. Make sure they know you’ll never by another GM car.
- monkpit 3mo agoWhat makes you think they would care? If they cared they wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
- al_borland 3mo agoThey will care of sales slump and the feedback they are getting is all asking for CarPlay/Android Auto. Even Tesla said they started working on CarPlay support when their sales started to suffer for unrelated reasons.
- stego-tech 3mo agoI’m with OP, here: CarPlay is additive to the experience, but also is something that provides me a degree of consistency across my automotive experiences - when vendors bother to implement it properly. I have an old Honda Fit that I installed one of Pioneer’s “app radio” units into, which included replacing the dash facia. I use CarPlay on it almost exclusively, but if I want Pioneer’s incredibly mediocre UI/UX, it’s a single button-tap away - either on the left side of the radio via a capacitance button, or on the first page of CarPlay’s app icons. When I rented a car to drive to visit family, it had CarPlay. The infotainment experience was familiar, so I could focus more on the road ahead instead of fussing with some newfangled vendor-specific infotainment shitshow. When I rented Nissan in Canada, it too had CarPlay - but with a nasty bug where using voice commands or making a call would crash the whole unit. I figured out very quickly not to do that, and the rest of CarPlay worked a treat for the trip - a far cry better from Nissan’s UI/UX. This is why I didn’t hop on board infotainment systems until CarPlay and Android Auto were mature options, opting to stick with my phone over USB for audio/iPod controls instead: none of the major manufacturers except maybe Panasonic actually give a shit about the UI/UX. They don’t build intuitive systems that can be operated without looking, and they scoop up far too much superfluous data to enable simple features. I refuse to buy the vehicle maker excuse of “superior experience” anymore when time after time, the reality is these car companies think the infotainment data is some sort of goldmine of revenue and letting Apple or Google have any say over the experience is tantamount to leaving money on the table. If I cannot have CarPlay, and your EV or vehicle won’t let me swap the infotainment unit for an aftermarket one that does, then I am not buying your fucking spyware on wheels. I don’t think anyone else should tolerate that bullshit either, especially on what averages to be a $70k+ purchase nowadays.
- jesterson 3mo agoQuite interesting, particularly with statistics shared in comments. Personally I hate CarPlay because of it's limitations - oh you can't respond to messages, oh you can't watch videos and sorts. Much easier to have a tablet there free of these "safety" limitations.
- alex0015 3mo agoIt's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone. I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.
- qmarchi 3mo agoCarPlay and Android Auto only really started seeing adoption in post 2017 Model Year vehicles. Anyone I know that has one, will immediately either plugin or connect whenever they go live. There's other benefits like (in the aforementioned article), CarPlay Ultra being able to send data to multiple screens like the front dash. Where having my directions right next to me speed means I don't have to check two screens.
- alex0015 3mo agoOh, that's really cool. For about two years the car I drove and the phone I had lined up such that I could kind of wedge it in the front dash next to the speedometer, and that was for sure a better location than the dash mount I have now. I'd forgotten about that.
- Ancapistani 3mo agoI’m not a huge fan of it, but I do find it more convenient than BlueTooth alone. For context, I drive a ‘91 GMC pickup, so neither cars nor car audio are super important to me. I still bought a CarPlay-enabled Android head unit because it’s less of a hassle to use.
- fluidcruft 3mo agoI use Android Auto a lot when traveling in rental cars. The alternative is annoying. With Android Auto, I at least know how to navigate and play audio with minimal effort. Otherwise I just use my phone and in a rental I typically don't have a mount so it's annoying because my phone discovers new and unexpected places to hide. First world problems, I know.
- wxw 3mo agoCarPlay is great. Generally much better than the interface offered by traditional manufacturers. But Tesla and Rivian both have excellent UIs. I don’t find myself missing CarPlay in a Tesla.
- oaiey 3mo agoThe amount of confusive naming of CarPlay vs CarPlay Ultra and Android Auto vs Android Automotive brings into this conversation is amazing.
- slashdave 3mo agoRivian sees Apple (CarPlay) as competition. So what is surprising?
- InTheArena 3mo agoThe interesting thing is that there is a lot of evidence that Tesla is about to embed Carplay. Rivian has taken over the privileged insanely expensive EV car market, as the Model Y is the closest thing to the old Honda/Toyota dominance, just in the EV space.
- MagicMoonlight 3mo ago[dead]
- bombcar 3mo agoTesla at least somewhat busted ass in the whole "iPad screen in the car" movement, and CarPlay was more invasive in some ways then than it is now.
- earth-tattoo 3mo agoSlightly off topic. Is it just me, or do others also feel it's horrendously difficult to read these AI written articles?
- IgorPartola 3mo agoI am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I use my phone for navigation and mount it such that when I look at it I am not taking my eyes off the road. I find this to be far better than having to look down at the center of my dashboard but CarPlay navigation UI via Google Maps or Waze also works fine so it’s not a huge difference. Realistically the only navigation UI have seen that was better was a 2012 or 2013 BMW 5 series which had a HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield. That system rocked because of how the projected UI had your eyes focus farther out so you had a very easy time perceiving the road ahead while getting the next direction info. I assume my next car will have it and I might even upgrade the radio in my current car to have it but it is to me entirely optional.
- ipdashc 3mo ago> I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I'm in the same boat, though with Android Auto or whatever. I'm honestly surprised how many people seem to need CarPlay; a comment or two down there's a stat claiming 79% of buyers wouldn't buy a car without it. Is it that different from the Android implementation? Is there something special about it? I don't get it. It's a nice to have for sure, but honestly not that special, and gets annoying at times (when Android Auto connects on my phone, it tends to stop me from using the maps app on the phone, plus a few other minor grievances). And it's not much easier than just plugging in an aux cord.
- shawabawa3 3mo agoI'm one of the people that wouldn't buy a card without android auto and carplay support Car UIs are just universally awful. Even if somehow you find one with a decent UI, it will never get updated and within 5 years it will suck
- IgorPartola 3mo agoNo within 5 years it would be exactly the same :)
- glitchc 3mo agoI love how people are pushing for Android Auto and CarPlay on the basis of consistency and ubiquity and control, yet fail to realize that their advocacy will reduce what is currently a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly. Once that happens we all know what comes next: enshittification.
- Telaneo 3mo ago> a thriving marketplace filled with unique options to a duopoly. If the car infotainment market is what counts as 'thriving' with 'unique options', then I don't want a thriving market, because that's apparently a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of unique options. Outside of Carplay, Android Auto and Tesla (and maybe a few other very recent models), they're all shit. I don't want hundreds of bad options. I want one (at least, more is preferable) good option.
- addozhang 3mo agoIf the cainfotainment system is good enough, I don't use CarPlay - at most I just connect Bluetooth to make calls. The reason CarPlay and Android Auto exist is that car infotainment systems used to suck.
- Telaneo 3mo agoThey still suck (modulo Tesla and maybe a few other very recent models).
- bdavbdav 3mo agoI use CarPlay all the time in my car and love it. I rent quite a lot of cars. I’d rather CarPlay was taken from my car and left in all the rental cars than the other way around. The car manufacturers are awful with their interface design, and being able to get into a new car at 9pm in the dark, and have a familiar interface while navigating some unknown city is invaluable. Consistency is safety and comfort in this situation.
- shermantanktop 3mo agoThis is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors. Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netflix or Prime Video or Disney and watch. But the premium hardware brands need to fight to stay alive, and giving customers what they want is a death sentence.
- someonebaggy 3mo agoAre there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.
- bombcar 3mo agoA surprisingly large number of customers DO want the smart TV to "just work" and play their Netflix. Like car infotainment, they figure out how to use it, bitch about it, and some connect an Apple device and use that instead.
- shermantanktop 3mo agoYes, they want the Netflix app to run on the tv. What they don’t want is Samsung’s “launcher” app which tries to create personalized recommendations, direct the customer to some other service that signed a deal with Samsung, and try to jump in and collect the user’s credit card to bill on their behalf.
- voidUpdate 3mo agoJust give me a head unit with an aux in and a cd player and I'll be happy
- stevoski 3mo agoI have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”. The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users. https://killthehippo.com/ https://killthehippo.com/
- senordevnyc 3mo agoCongrats on writing a book, big accomplishment! I'm confused about the cupholder example though: I'd MUCH rather skip CarPlay (which I love) than cupholders in a car, but I wouldn't shop for a car based on whether it has cupholders because surely they all do, right? It seems like shopping based on whether the car has A/C or something.
- stevoski 3mo ago> Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment! Thank you! The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves. Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers. Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is. If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.
- Groxx 3mo agoEvery time I've used CarPlay or Android Auto, I just remember how much better the experience was with a tablet velcro'd over the main display. Immediately obviously better in every single way, and dramatically cheaper and easier to replace if desired. I get the goal, and I'm glad there's at least some semblance of a standard. But it's still bad.
- rootsudo 3mo agoWonder how GM is doing it
- 63stack 3mo ago>The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users. Wassym Bensaid sounds like an incompetent person to be a chief software officer working on cars if he does not understand this is not how carplay works. It's either this, or he's just weaseling out of saying "we want to capture all our users data, and we want to put in rent seeking subscriptions into our cars, which is going to be hard if we enable carplay". Do not buy cars from companies like this.
- physhster 3mo agoAt this point it's very easy: no CarPlay, no buy. So no Tesla (obv), no Rivian.
- mattrighetti 3mo agoOpinionated, but Tesla's interface seems better than any CarPlay? The thing with CarPlay that I hate the most is that it is laggy. I have it on a Series 5 BMW and Spotify has a delay of at least 4s when you select a song and when it actually starts playing. Same thing when you rapidly skip tracks - the interface changes but the speakers (or any other non-CarPlay interface) can't really keep up. It really is a joke, especially on that kind of vehicle.
- benrutter 3mo agoThere's so many comments on the lines of "I would never buy a car without android auto/car play support". I 100% used to be on this camp, "A car without android auto, what am I, a caveman!?". Anyway, separately to anything car related, I got fed up of some of google's treatment of android and switched to Murena's /e/os which is a de-googled spin of android. It doesn't support android auto, and that held me back from switching for ages. Long story short, I don't miss android auto at all. Bluetooth is absolutely fine for playing media from my phone etc. (my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't)
- Telaneo 3mo ago> (my car does already have functionality like google maps built in though, so I might feel differently if it didn't) See if you care in 5 years when the maps are out of date.
- benrutter 3mo agoNo, I meant literally the car has google maps built in - it's an up to date android app.
- Telaneo 3mo agoSo you have Android Automotive? (stupid name) Where does it get it's internet connection from? It's going to need that to keep the maps updated. I'm not sure how long the Google Maps app will stay alive in your case. I doubt AA will get updates 10 years after a sale, but even if it doesn't and you're stuck on an old version of Google Maps, assuming the underlying API doesn't change, I guess that doesn't matter?
- benrutter 3mo ago> So you have Android Automotive? (stupid name) Yes I do! And yes it is! It's a fairly recent Volvo, and it has a sim card (or something along those lines) that connects to the internet. It also can use a phones connection via bluetooth, so internet wise I think would be fine, and uses that connection to update the cars software. I can't say how long the software will work for - I guess that depends on how long Volvo support their software for. I'm optimistic but I guess I'll find out in quite a few years time!
- linzhangrun 3mo agoFor pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself. Its advantages are mainly these: - Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system. - "It's on your phone". You can decide what playlist to play or where to navigate before you even get into the car. - Stays up to date over the long term. Just look at cars from five years ago. Most built-in infotainment systems are still stuck in that era, no matter how smart they once looked. CarPlay uses your phone as the main computing platform, and the car's infotainment system only needs to act as a thin client for I/O, it keeps updating with iOS.
- brookst 3mo agoYou missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym. CarPlay is user-centric, which is why users like it. All these attempts to force people into a device-centric experience make no sense. I spent an hour or two a day, at most, in my car. My phone is within Bluetooth distance every waking moment. Why in the world would I want my car to be a disjointed experience?
- Mashimo 3mo ago> You missed the biggest one: continuity. Start listening to music at home, take it to the car. Start a podcast in the car, finish it in the gym. That would still work, as you can use Bluetooth.
- jebarker 3mo agoAs an R1S owner I feel like the elephant in the room is that the Rivian developed infotainment software is just not very good. For example, the Spotify app has weird scrolling issues and the interface for offline downloads is clunky and unreliable. The maps/route planning is fine but not really any better than Apple/Google Maps (or ABRP). So I find it hard to give much credit to their argument against CarPlay when they’re not providing a better experience via their native apps.
- aswegs8 3mo agoIn the end they treat a podcast like this as PR. "We're great". Elaborate rationalizations of their decisions.
- fsniper 3mo agoCar manufacturer build infotainment never is.
- HolyLampshade 3mo agoOne of those silly little issues with inbuilt software that drives me insane is the number of times I’ve had to log back into Apple Music or Spotify (or one of the video services to occupy the kiddo while parked for extended duration). That’s another one that phones have just solved with the integrated password manager. The friction of providing credentials on my other devices has been reduced, but all of a sudden I need to go hunting through that pwd manager, and hunting and pecking on the infotainment keyboard, to enter a 20+ char unique pwd that modern “best practices” has established. It got bad enough for a bit (swver changes resulting in needing to re-log in) that I stopped using all of these apps for 2-3yr on our Model Y because I got tired of having to do it.
- neogodless 3mo agoHow well does Pandora work for music?
- jebarker 3mo agoAs far as I’m aware there is no native Pandora app, just TuneIn for internet radio. Do for Pandora you’d have to stream from a phone via Bluetooth.
- afandian 3mo agoAm I the only person who hates plugging their iPhone into their car to charge and completely losing control of it? When I plug it into the USB socket, my Peugeot 207 starts playing a random podcast track on my phone. No way of stopping it. If I stop it, it starts again. I can't select a different audio output, e.g. the phone speaker. There are plenty of people complaining about this on the forums. Yes, it's a bug in either the iPhone or the car. Yes the bug shouldn't be there, but it is. I should be able to disable it. I'm in the habit of bringing a spare battery with me so I can use phone sat-nav.
- Telaneo 3mo agoYour car is broken, and was apparently sold as such. I'd return the car for that, or just never buy it in the first place if I noticed it during research or a test drive.
- afandian 3mo agoIt's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing. But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into? It's unreasonable to prevent me from changing the audio output. Examples: - https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/mp3-ipod-random-play-problems.36961 https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/mp3-ipod-random-play-p... - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254051162?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254051162?sortBy=rank
- Telaneo 3mo ago> It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing. Presumably it's been a problem since day 1. Meaning it was broken on day 1. > But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into? There's the 'trust this device?' popup that should prevent the problem if you don't want the car to do anything with your device. If you want finder control, then from Apple's point of view, it's probably that this would needlessly clutter the UI, given that it shouldn't be an issue in the first place. Then again, I don't think Android supports finer controls either way.
- camgunz 3mo agoCar manufacturers don't want this because it gives Apple/Google leverage over their products. The alternative is some kind of open standard, but that undercuts the ability of manufacturers to hard fuck you on trim options. One of the more irritating parts of late stage capitalism is the complete inability of its scions (CEOs, etc.) to say any of this. The gaslighting is insufferable.
- kleiba2 3mo agoAnd here I am, ideally not wanting any screen in my car, but just the good ole buttons and knobs of yesteryear... sigh...
- prmoustache 3mo agoWhy do people want so much to be distracted from and while driving? Is there still a single responsible driver left on the road?
- trashb 3mo agobut what do people actually use carplay for? Navigation, music and calls? I suspect that 90% of the people that "need" carplay are actually just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection. I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car.
- Telaneo 3mo ago> just using it as a bluetooth speaker and would be fine with a good phoneholder and bluetooth/aux connection. Is it unreasonable to have this functionality built in to the car? I can't see any good reasons not to have it from the consumer's point of view. Carplay doesn't even have a licence fee, so it's basically free to implement. And it's not like there's a shortage of options. Removing the cars that don't have it of your shortlist is an easy way to filter off the options that don't even pretend to respect you as a user.
- mystifyingpoi 3mo ago> I always feel strange connecting to someone else their carlpay or to a rental car. Honest question, why? It is literally remote desktop + some pipes for audio and screen touches. It's no different than connecting an external touchscreen to a smartphone, lapdock-style.
- SilverBirch 3mo ago>If Rivian’s native UI is so great, then their customers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that simple. I kind of disagree with this. Airpods are purely additive, customers can just choose to use different headphones with their iPhone if they want. But they don't want, because Apple lets Airpods interact with the iPhone in a way that other manufacturers can't. So no, carplay wouldn't be mandatory but it's likely that Apple's leverage will kill their in house offering.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoIt’s up to them if they stop working on their in house offering. If it is inferior, people won’t use it. Apple doesn’t have any leverage over what they develop.
- pi-victor 3mo agoCarplay is a convenient - FREE solution to car infotainment that car makers cannot control. They cannot sell you subscription based services for in-car stuff if you can get that from another app, and that's not in their interest. The CEO here knows well what he's saying is BS. We are lucky if something like Carplay will survive in the car subscription based era. They might charge you for the use of Carplay in the future, or free access to their infotainment that is complemented by subscritions. Car makers sell cars with thin margins so they need to find ways to increase them.
- Telaneo 3mo agoI've never seen a normal car infotainment system I liked (at least beyond 'put in a CD, then use next and previous track'), and Carplay is such a massive improvement over that. It's good, it's consistent, it's the same everywhere, it's up to date, it uses data from my phone. There's nothing to not like. The rest of the infotainment system could literally not exist[1] (beyond integrating buttons to actually control Carplay), and I wouldn't care. The car's infotainment system could just be a Carplay runtime and I'd be good. [1] There are probably some features I'm forgetting that probably count as part of the infotainment, but which Carplay doesn't touch, like AC and battery info and management. The AC in my own car is completely separate from the infotainment system, but that probably doesn't apply to all cars. But even in those cases, it'd be better if integrated into Carplay, or just left out of what's happening on screen, and instead be given seperate manual controls.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jojobas 3mo agoIt boils down to "who owns the field". Facebook and Apple killed Flash because they wanted control. Rivian is trying to say "we will own the users eyes, their phones be damned".
- zaep 3mo agoI don't own a car, and I found the article mildly interesting, but I can't get over the sentence > Our last three cars, the eldest of which was from the 2017 model year [...]. Is it common to buy three cars in let's say 10 years? That seems like a large amount of spend (afaik cars depreciate in value rather quick?) and -- barring accidents -- a really short time to have to replace something as sturdy as a car; If I get less than three years out of a phone it feels like a waste and it feels like the main barrier for phone longevity (besides batteries, which are replaceable) is security updates. IDK, since I don't see any comments on it, it must not be that strange, it just struck me as odd.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- _diyar 3mo agoI happen to listen to ATP, a tech podcast of which Casey is a co-host. I believe his family owns 2 cars, but had to replace one of them recently when a pebble caused a freak accident, essentially totaling the engine in one of the cars. Hence 3 cars purchased in 10 years. Edit: Episode #592, at the very end: https://overcast.fm/+ABQnv4mYCFc/1:40:38 https://overcast.fm/+ABQnv4mYCFc/1:40:38
- bombcar 3mo agoIn the USA at least, you seem to either be in the "buy/lease new, trade in every 3-5 years" camp, or "buy it and drive it until the wheels fall off." If you do the first, you end up not being out a terrible amount of money, especially these days with the high value of used.
- Merad 3mo agoThe average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.
- degoldman666 3mo agoiPod, aux cable, phone holder for maps. Anything else can wait until I stop.
- andai 3mo agoIsn't it dangerous and illegal to do stuff on your phone while driving? In this case it's on a bigger screen so it's okay somehow? (I haven't experienced one of these in person though, so I might be missing something.)
- tinco 3mo agoI don't know how CarPlay is, but Android Auto restricts the apps and app interactions you can do in the Android Auto user interface. On my phone the only apps that show up are google maps, spotify, and my podcast player and my phone interface I think.
- Telaneo 3mo agoYou can control Carplay the most relevant parts with buttons. Next-previous track, volume, voice commands, probably more I can't think of. Not to mention that yes, a bigger screen probably is better. Bigger target = easier to hit. The legality can become a lessened problem, depending on jurisdiction. Using your phone while driving is often specifically illegal, but using your car's infotainment system might not be automatically illegal (it might count as distracted driving or whatever, but the threshold of proof is higher).
- netsharc 3mo agoFor a blog named with a wordplay on "Less is more", this text sure has a loooooot of unncessary bullshit before getting to the point.
- slowmotiony 3mo agoPretty sure it's an ad for theverge subscriptions
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoThe car industry is currently in the "rodeo" phase that the telcos where in when it came to the internet. Loosing power- and very soon tamed, because the Chinese competition has no such qualms.
- amacbride 3mo ago[dead]
- senordevnyc 3mo agoI get where the author is coming from, but it seems to me that the core issue here isn't CarPlay, it's that car manufacturers are absolute dogshit at software. Most Tesla owners don't seem that upset about the lack of CarPlay, I'm assuming because the native Tesla experience is really good. I'm not sure people would care as much if that were the case more often. And cars are increasingly a software-bound experience that CarPlay can only get you out of so far. I have a Volvo XC40 EV, and even though it's a decent car and I've had multiple Volvos that I've loved, I probably won't buy another one because the software experience is so bad. And that's WITH CarPlay!
- nntwozz 3mo agoI considered buying a new 2-DIN CarpPlay stereo for my 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara but went with a simple 12V LENCENT Bluetooth V5.4 FM Transmitter instead that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket. The reason was that the original stereo has a custom shape that fits the dashboard, it's rounded and the fascia is apparently easy to crack when removing. I attach my phone with a CD-mount that goes into the CD-player (I hate those vent-mounts) and then I just connect the radio to whatever frequency the FM transmitter is set to. It works surprisingly well, I was skeptical at first reading some negative reviews but I'm super satisfied. The signal never cracks but YMMV, I have it set to 87.5 in rural Sweden and it sounds perfectly clear in the domain of 128 kbit MP3. I'm a sound guy but I think with the poor sound isolation of the car and the OK speakers it sounds perfectly adequate and even a bit nostalgic— it's how I remember car trips in the 90s and early 2000s. It costs €30-40 and I also get a USB-C PD and a second USB-QC 3.0 on the device. Simple and keeps everything original in the car.
- massysett 3mo agoI think CarPlay is evidence of failure. My aim is device independence. In the old days, to print I had to hook up my printer to a computer. To print from a computer on the network, I needed a print server. I had to administer that. Now the printer itself hooks to the network, which is far superior. I have an older thermostat which allows me to program vacations directly on the unit. This is superior to the newer thermostat, with which I must use my phone for this. My dishwasher requires me to use my phone to do a delayed start. This is inferior to what it replaced, which was a model that allowed me to do delayed start from the panel on the dishwasher. Devices should work on their own. So it’s a failure if the first thing I need to do in the car is tether it to a phone. The car needs nav, it needs radio, etc. It would be better if it has those things built in. I understand the complaint in this thread, which is that the carmakers are bad at this. I don’t own a Tesla or Rivian, but some folks are saying their interfaces are good. Those carmakers have the right idea. I begrudgingly accept CarPlay. I don’t like it. In this era when computing is as cheap as it is and where even a TV can hook directly to network to play back content, it makes no sense that the solution on a $40,000 car is to plug it in to a phone.
- bmicraft 3mo agoBut it does make sense. You probably looked up where you're going before entering the car on your phone. You probably want to hear the same music or podcasts as on you phone. Do you really want the car to have separate internet connection, and login for every app? Also you need to connect the phone anyway if you want hands free calling.
- macguillicuddy 3mo agoI agree that devices should work independently. But I believe the fundamental baseline should be open interoperability. Yes, the dishwasher should allow a delayed start from the machine itself. But it should also have secure yet open interoperability so other authorised systems that care about the dishwasher can interact with it. I think there's ultimately a user experience benefit. I'm familiar with my phone, its UI paradigms etc. If I (or my gran) can use the dishwasher through an interface or voice assistant we're already familiar with then that's a win. Especially if the form factor of the device itself makes it challenging to deliver a great and intuitive interface in-situ. In this regard CarPlay is evidence of success - a sufficiently interoperable car that allows users to bring their own context and ecosystems. CarPlay is only evidence of failure if your expectation is that the car should provide a comparable ecosystem to Android or iOS - one that must also somehow follow you in your pocket when you leave the car.
- sailfast 3mo ago“Stop being so intransigent” / “I will NEVER buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay” is pretty funny. That said, I agree with the author. Autos are not software companies and they are only locking us in for their own benefit. Anybody not supporting other common standards is probably not telling the whole truth about the reasoning.
- slowmotiony 3mo agoI don't listen to the opinions of people who try to sell me a podcast subscription
- neogodless 3mo ago> that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users You lost me right there Rivian. Start picturing yourselves worrying more about how your users picture themselves interacting with THEIR car... and stop worrying about controlling interactions between you and your users. Switch your frame of thinking around.
- sorenjan 3mo agoThis is the problem with so many modern companies. Instead of focusing on building great products that their customers will enjoy using, they're trying to build relationships with users. Maybe I'm overthinking things, but to me "user" implies a different more subordinate role where you take what you get, there's no "the customer is always right" when it comes to "users".
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo agoRivian has a monthly premium subscription for their infotainment If they introduced CarPlay they will essentially be taping their wallet shut themselves from their point of view when they need the money But their current infotainment has a lot to be desired and a bunch of dumb bugs. CarPlay would allow me as a customer to have a better experience of their vehicles to sidestep their shit navigation I hear the r2 software will help. But CarPlay would be better experience that includes apps I want to use, like overcast. Rj just wants that subscription money and power instead of what a large percent of their users want.
- dalyons 3mo agoSubscription money of $10 mo minus the cost of the cellular data connection and data, which is probably ~$8mo. So, a whopping profit of $24 a year? I hear this theory a lot but it doesn’t actually make sense given the numbers
- unclad5968 3mo agoThe idea of paying a subscription to use my cars infotainment is insane, regardless of how much the manufacturer profits.
- spovzner 3mo agoAndroid Auto has upgraded Google Assistant to Gemini recently. Huge improvement. All the AI conversations are now available with a single button on your steering wheel. You can say "play that song about [something]" and it will get it most of the time. Preference for Android Auto/Carplay is much more than (subjectively) better navigation/media. It's about all the other apps that Tesla/Rivian don't support like WhatsApp, Waze, etc.
- DannyBee 3mo agoI used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do. I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian. In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud. Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay. On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay. I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not. and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again. But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.
- neogodless 3mo agoMy Polestar didn't have Android Auto when I bought it. Navigation was still Google Maps, and text integration was there. But no Pandora for music. And that's the problem, in my opinion. Even Android Automotive is way behind Android Auto in app support. That reduces the owner's choices for which software they want to use for their use cases.
- mikelikespie 3mo agoI’m in a similar spot. I miss CarPlay much less than I expected because the Rivian software is really good. The big thing I really miss from CarPlay is having text messages announced. Google Maps on the phone is a bit better too but I got over that quickly (TTS, features like showing road hazards, and general rendering)
- thefourthchime 3mo agoI own a Tesla not a Rivian, but I agree with you here. As a software engineer, I find CarPlay to be a tack-on solution. For that, it works well, but only because the base infotainment systems on almost every OEM are utter trash. Something that I don't believe is discussed enough, especially here, is how bad 90% of software is in general. Software from non-software companies, almost without exception, is just junk. It has stuff tacked garbage from a partner deals, confusing organization that seemed like a product or marketing guy that never used the software. I could go on. The exceptions, of course, are Rivian and Tesla, who actually make first-class software. On them, I don't miss it, And actually, I would be slightly annoyed if they had it, simply because it breaks up the consistency with infotainment.
- whh 3mo agoI can’t be the only one who thinks we’re going a bit too far with the attention grab of vehicle infotainment. CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone. But some of these new infotainment systems, and the complete lack of physical controls, are starting to feel extremely unsafe.
- moolcool 3mo agoI admire the restraint the CarPlay designers have in adding features. E.g. in music apps, you can't click-through to an artist page from a song page. Annoying on the surface, but it actually naturally restricts your mucking about in menus. I bet any money that that one choice has saved lives.
- xp84 3mo agoYour thesis is right but in this example this is instead one of the “Alan Dye” hidden UI instances where the functionality is intentionally hidden (I presume in the name of aesthetic minimalism rather than safety, because this is what Apple design does outside CarPlay too). At least in Apple Music, I think you tap on the artist name in the now playing screen, and I think you get a menu to go to album or artist from there. If I’m wrong, somebody correct me and I’ll delete, I’m away from my car today and can’t verify.
- samcolson42 3mo agoThis interaction works in Apple Music on the phone, but not in CarPlay.
- hbn 3mo agoYou can verify from my comment history that I love talking shit about Mr Dye as much as the next guy, but no. Car Play limitations are certainly not an Alan Dye decision. Everything in CarPlay is stripped down cause it's not safe to be navigating menus and doing deep interactions while driving. The passenger can use the phone if you want to be able to scroll through an artist's catalog, rearrange playlists, etc. CarPlay's UI is a quick way to access your current library.
- anticorporate 3mo agoAuthor: I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay. Me: I literally will not buy a car that does.
- fidotron 3mo agoCasey is right, but the whole point for the Rivian position is they see themselves as the car software platform of the future. The idea we want primarily phone UIs in our cars is antithetical to their very existence, or why VW invested in them. The idea customers should have control over the interfaces they use needs to be reinforced. If anything this is why the AI wave has gained so much hype as now people get to bypass so much nonsense masquerading as UX.
- fdgwhite 3mo agoMaybe someone already said this but my pet peeve is restrictions on wireless CarPlay. We have a top of the line Kia Telluride that only has wired CarPlay. Then we rented a crappy Kia sedan on vacation and it had wireless. Apparently the developer of Telluride’s fancy built in navigation system prohibits wireless CarPlay
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoJust get a wireless CarPlay adapter.
- 2d8a875f-39a2-4 3mo ago"My one walled garden won't let my other walled garden in."
- nubg 3mo agoCarPlay is subtractive for the car manufacturer who wants to track you and sell your data. That's all you need to know about this debate. Of course CarPlay is the far superior UX. It's entertaining to see car manufacturers bend over and come up with ridiculous justifications for why they "cannot" give you the option to just use CarPlay.
- andreygrehov 3mo agoPersonally, I avoid all cars that have CarPlay. This technology has nothing to do with a car. It's just a phone on a bigger screen, pure marketing by Apple that stifles innovation within the car manufacturing industry. I love Apple products, but CarPlay is boring af. And don't get me wrong i do understand why people love CarPlay. Problem is, majority of people don't know why CarPlay is so bad - many haven't used anything better, and they won't, because Apple stifles innovation in this space. It's a loop.
- maxdo 3mo agocarPlay is a horrible every time you sit down inside of the car, you need to care about connectivity, if your phone charged etc. It's a neurotic habit. As a tesla owner, i feel carPlay is such a dumb idea. you buy a car that cost ~$50k+ to rely on every drive on your phone. It's a freedom to be phone free. And yeah, it's still integrated. My profiles are in sync, if my wife sit down in the car, it adjust the seat height, wheel, temperature , music etc. If I'm listening Spotify using my headphones it switches to car the moment i open the door etc.
- maxdo 3mo agocarPlay is Stockholm syndrome on wheels. people have suffered through its clunky handshake for so long that they've started defending their captor. My friend's $100k Audi makes him spend five minutes accepting terms of service just to enter a GPS destination. On contrary, he can hop into my Tesla and drive off instantly ...location already sent from my phone, key shared from the phone, but wow, no car play involved. One my friends owns android. No problem at all.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoI hop into my car and CarPlay just automatically puts up the route I already have in my phone and starts working. A bad implementation doesn’t mean the feature or service is bad. It just means you made a poor choice.
- memsom 3mo agoEven when CarPlay is full screen, it is possible to have a the manufacturer's UI available. My Ford Sync 3 will let me get back the the car UI via an icon that is the Ford logo - it loos like a regular app, but it's sole purpose is "go back to the car's infotainment." This is useful for controlling the radio and tweaking settings, but not a lot else.
- harvie 3mo agoAll i want is car without infotainment of any kind. And a nice place to mount phone or tablet.
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoSo this goes back to the loss of the DIN in vehicles. Vehicle manufacturers shot themselves in the tire decades ago when they stopped caring about DIN space and started forcing themselves to develop and then abandon the lead position on vehicle infotainment. Carplay isn't very special when you consider any 90s and early 2000s vehicle with a DIN slot or two can have all the exact same functionality as Carplay with unlimited upgrades for around $200 in hardware. The OEMs failed to innovate and outright hubris meant they would not roll-back to what worked well for everyone. Apple deserves to eat their lunch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736
- rubatuga 3mo agoAll CarPlay is is sending video and audio (like a Moonlight stream) over USB Ethernet. It should be a recognized standard at this point so that you can have a custom device plug in to your car, and have your own UI. But regulations (think watching YouTube while you drive) unfortunately prevent this
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoRivian refusing to bend the knee to Apple should be met with more respect. You are free to force yourself to never buy a vehicle without Apple software, however you're just adding another shackle between your life and their massive walled garden. Should Rivian continue to innovate as Tesla did, your choice will become hard to maintain. Never is quite a long time.
- Pxtl 3mo agoI'm still angry that I can't just run Android Auto directly anymore on my phone when I'm in a vehicle that doesn't have Android Auto support and my phone is just dash-mounted (or handlebar-mounted). Usedtacould.
- enos_feedler 3mo agoWhat the auto industry should have really woken up to is the idea of a singular carplay for both android and ios. I have a 2021 BMW that only supported carplay and was fine for many years. It is wireless even. I love it. But now i have a pixel.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoYou could try a wireless adapter that will convert Android Auto to CarPlay.
- notglossy 3mo agoCarPlay is a nightmare for many because its premise only considers 2 options: use CarPlay, don’t use CarPlay. If you want to mix and match features across what your car offers and CarPlay offers (e.g. use Podcasts app but stick with native navigation), the UX starts to breakdown very quickly.
- TheTon 3mo agoNo, this scenario works fine. Car audio (and UI) can interleave with CarPlay. I can put podcasts on my center screen, my car manufacturer's navigation in the driver's screen, and the navigation prompts will duck the podcast and interrupt as appropriate. This isn't hypothetical or hard, my car does exactly this today.
- gchamonlive 3mo agoI prefer my WV Up! infotainment system. It's just a dumb radio/media with a factory phone mount. The actual radio has physical buttons to navigate the config and modes and for everything else you use the phone's touch screen. With 6.8" phone screen it's really good. A good middle ground would be to have physical buttons to interact with the manufacturer interface and the touch screen to interact exclusively with CarPlay
- Utilera 3mo agoThe strangest part is that this should be an easy win for car makers. If your native system is better, people will use it. If it isn't, forcing them to use it doesn't make it better, it just makes the car feel worse
- uni_baconcat 3mo agoI’ll buy an accessory display that supports CarPlay/Android Auto and attach it to the dashboard and still won’t use the navigation in the infotainment system.
- nickpeterson 3mo agoIs the mechanism through which CarPlay/Android Auto works locked down? Could a third party make a competing app for iOS or android that would connect to cars and run on the screen? Or perhaps a special piece of hardware to hook in to older cars?
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoThird party wireless adapters are available for CarPlay or Android Auto.
- overgard 3mo agoSoftware in cars ages like milk, and car manufacturers are not good at software. I would much rather just have a dumb screen my phone pairs with.
- Hackbraten 3mo agoI will not buy a car.
- josefresco 3mo agoPersonally I found CarPlay to be incredibly underwhelming. Very limited app support beyond navigation and music. In addition I frequently have issues switching which phone it's using thanks to terrible iOS BT and of course the ever annoying issue where someone is using the phone that is projecting, and your music suddenly cuts out to play obnoxious audio. The only advantage over a traditional car media center/nav is the always updated and personalized map/nav.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoApp support is up to the app developer as always.
- drunken_thor 3mo agoCarPlay is also a contract between mobile devs and automakers. It allows for things like displaying "current playing" on the dash, media buttons on the steering wheel that control apps, and turn by turn directions show on dash and HUD. A screen cast may be able to do this but not in a consistent dependable way. Also no one is mentioning that maybe we should not encourage users to use 1000s of apps in their car? It would be irresponsible to easily allow users to watch youtube while driving. Keeping the set of apps usable through the car is a responsibility in automobiles that are already becoming too distracting as is.
- _-_-__-_-_- 3mo agoI've had CarPlay on my last two cars, a 2018 VW Golf and a 2024 Ford Maverick. It's fine. Sometimes you plug your phone into the USB port (unlocked) and it refuses to connect for several minutes very frustrating when you want to start navigation and media playback before leaving the driveway. My favourite headunit experience was my aftermarket single DIN Kenwood (https://www.kenwood.com/ca/car/caraudio/receivers/kdc-bt282u/ https://www.kenwood.com/ca/car/caraudio/receivers/kdc-bt282u...) in my MK4 Golf it was an easy swap. You could plug in any iPod or iPhone and it would play and control the audio directly from the headunit and show title information on the display. Plus, it would take any USB storage device and play music. It was such a simple and efficient experience.
- tonymet 3mo agoImagine if customers demanded MacBooks boot into Android when an android phone was connected . The cars primary UI is the screen. Car Clay defers the cars experience to Apple . Customers have been demanding CarPlay because most car UIs are poor. But if done properly, they can exceed CarPlay while being consistent and well integrated
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoImagine a new popular music streaming service (Tidal?) came out tomorrow - when will it be supported on your phone? When will your car support it, if ever?
- tonymet 3mo agoyou're right. i would rather see this handled using a better authorization protocol like Chromecast did, rather than taking over the UI. Losing control over the UI for the car, to support media playback isn't even a good engineering approach, let alone being a good user experience.
- brucejackson 3mo agoLike the author, CarPlay is table stakes for any vehicle purchase. I literally installed a Sony screen receiver in my 2016 F150, that was given to my by my father after he lost his license due to his age. That was a fun weekend with the dash apart reliving my younger days when I did car audio installations. The truck lasted 1 week before I had the dash apart to get CarPlay back. The native Ford infotainment system was so crap.
- matt-attack 3mo agoAs an Apple fanboy I have to say I’ve never been impressed with CarPlay. I’ve used it in rentals quite a bit but have found it generally infuriating. Primary reason is the map. On the Tesla you have this beautiful map that you can pan around and pinch zoom in and out of. On the versions of CarPlay that I’ve used, you can this minimal map that can’t be pinch zoomed. Seems like you have to tap the pan buttons by hand to get it to slide around. It’s just generally unusable. Like I don’t even know why people like this. Oh and then the nanny aspect of your phone becoming a black screen of just enumerated turns with no way to actually see the map yourself (if the car screen is unwilling to work right, my first instinct was to go to my phone but alas no they brick it). Before I owned a Tesla I remember thinking what a mistake it was that it didn’t have CarPlay because I assumed it was the best. Well it’s not. Not by a long shot.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoYou shouldn’t be panning or pinch to zoom, etc while driving. You should be following a route which you can setup with your phone.
- Footprint0521 3mo agoWon’t buy a car without CarPlay is crazy… lol CarPlay head units are like $200 tops
- ml_basics 3mo agoRead about half of the article wondering when it was going to explain why carplay is addictive
- physicalecon 3mo ago[dead]
- m463 3mo agoIt's simple - carplay is a financial threat to car manufacturers. - It commoditizes the car - it eliminates upsell features/subscriptions after the sale. - it costs money to add carplay - like car manufacturers don't want interchangable head units, they want to own the infotainment system. - like wireless carriers didn't want the iphone - they wanted locked-down phones where they were the only ones who could sell you ringtones or music.
- reboot81 3mo agoI drive a 2025 Kia Ceed and the all the infotainment does is get in my way. Id pay to have it removed. Carplay & Siri helps me stay focused on driving in a safe way.
- TooSmugToFail 3mo agoTried clicking the links to the Rivian web page. What a horrible experience. I have been trying to get some useful info about the cars (e.g. range), and the only option I had was to play a completely useless video which only made me dizzy. Then, desperate, I tried asking their AI chat what’s the expected range. It told me (great success!) but then it directed me back to the useless page. How useless.
- wilg 3mo agoCarPlay is for cars with shitty software
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoSo all of them.
- wilg 3mo agoAll but Tesla and Rivian I think.
- exabrial 3mo agoMy next vehicle will have first-class carplay support. I refuse to buy anything else. Manufacturers will figure this out.
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago> They make the experience of being in the car way way better. > I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay. I drive more than you, longer distances. I've been to Ibiza by car (with the car on the boat at some point, obviously), to the UK (with the car either on a boat or, later on, inside a train), I've crossed Germany at insane (legal) speeds to go to the end of Poland, I've been to Sweden, to Andorra, Italy, Croatia, etc. For I hate airplanes and very rarely hop in one (last time was in 2019). What makes the experience of driving sweet is soundproofing, the quality of the seats, the overall sweetness of the ride. It's got absolutely nothing to do with how big the screen (that shows you the same thing as your phone) is and zero to do with OS of the car's infotainment (unless the carmaker really fucked up big times and made an unusable system). The F-segment cars (euro notation) are enjoyable rides and this has nothing to do with Apple or Android CarPlay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-segment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-segment As a bonus: the soundsystem. People are going to say that listening to music in a car sucks anyway but once you get into high-end luxury cars, suddenly the sound proofing is so good that listening to music while driving is actually enjoyable. My car runs QNX as the OS for the infotainment. It's got its own memory for songs (I can put either mp3 or FLAC files: I have a mix of both), it's got an audio CD player (which I sometimes use, just because I can) and it's got bluetooth, so I can use Spotify or whatever suits me. It's mostly "one button / one function": not some distracting touch screen. It's a sweet sweet ride and I guarantee you that there are very few brand new cars from 2026 that are sweeter rides than my ride from 2013 (which, of course, I bought used --8 years ago now-- and paid less than most brand new cars). Now my car is 13 years old and has more than 200 000 km (125 000 miles): it's going to be time to change it. I'll sell it for half what I paid it and I'll buy another high-end luxury car, used. Same brand, same model. This time it'll have CarPlay (because the carmaker moved from QNX to CarPlay): but I guarantee you that it's not what makes that car great not that it's why I'll buy it. Judging a car, an item that's made for driving, by how easy it is to connect your smartphone to it is just plain face-palming and shows how addicted society is to smartphones. It's really just freaking sad.
- DangitBobby 3mo agoThe article's best point is about customer choice. If Rivian were really making its decision to deliver the best experience, they'd confidently ship something that supports CarPlay and let the customer choose the better option. Obviously when the customer sees Rivian's superior vision, they'll make the right choice. To me, any company that doesn't act this way gives away the game. It's about lock-in, control, subscriptions, selling tracking data. Definitely why GM is doing it, anyway.
- tomuow 3mo ago[flagged]
- icar 3mo agoBluetooth + phone mounted next to the wheel worked nicely (and still does in older models). I wish I had this option still. Better, AUX instead of Bluetooth. It would be so fast to plug&play...
- tensility 3mo agoAgreed. CarPlay support is table stakes fo me fir my next vehicle, no matter how good its native UI is.
- kbos87 3mo agoI currently have a Tesla (no CarPlay) and a Volvo EV with a reasonably good CarPlay implementation. I was in the same position as the writer until I experienced great in-vehicle software that I think only Tesla & Rivian can currently offer. I don't miss CarPlay one bit, and I think a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking it's the only viable option because they've never been exposed to an auto manufacturer who actually knows how to build software ;) The level of software-hardware integration you experience in a Rivian or Tesla is something that CarPlay just can't compete with. Personally I also don't want Tesla or Rivian to add CarPlay, because the reality is that it's not only additive. If Tesla & Rivian don't continue to nudge their buyers toward their native in-vehicle software CarPlay will continue to dominate simply because people will default to using what they are comfortable with. That will inevitably drive decisions by Tesla & Rivian about where and how they should invest in the in-vehicle experience. If you want CarPlay, there are plenty of legacy auto manufacturers out there who can give it to you.
- abustamam 3mo agoMaybe it's just familiarity, but same. I have a Tesla and I once rented a Toyota BZ whatever that had android auto. It was neat. But I struggled to do basic things. With Tesla I can navigate to the nearest charging station. I could not figure out how to do something as basic as that from the car. I had to use my phone (plug share or whatever) to find a charging station. I haven't driven a rivian but I've heard their UI is comparable to Tesla. That said, I don't see why cars need to have bespoke software in the first place. Ideally we have one or two open standards for infotainment systems. Imagine if you used a Dell then you used an HP and then you used an Alienware and they were all different!
- the_lucifer 3mo ago> Personally I also don't want Tesla or Rivian to add CarPlay Unfortunately for you, Tesla is working on adding CarPlay support to their cars (for what I assume is to boost their value and image to potential buyers). From earlier this year: https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/02/tesla-still-working-on-carplay-support-heres-what-we-know/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/02/tesla-still-working-on-carpla... More recently, Apple and Tesla are collaborating to fill any gaps in APIs to allow for CarPlay on Tesla vehicles: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/15/this-carplay-change-may-be-the-missing-link-for-tesla-support/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/15/this-carplay-change-may-be-th... Throughout several communications to developers, they have mentioned changes that lend credibility to this rumor, first in WWDC2026[1] and in 27 as well. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/212 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/212
- schnatterer 3mo agoWhat about privacy? No one here wonders what kind of data your car leaks to Apple/Google?
- kelvinjps10 3mo agoFor me the car infotainment system is okay, except for one thing and it's Google maps having the navigation on the car's screen itself it's way more convenient than on the phone or the bad gps the car has from factory