6 things I dislike about CarPlay

I use CarPlay on nearly all of my drives, and the core features, namely maps, music, and phone calls, work fine for the most part. But there are some small areas where I think improvement is required to make the experience even better.

In this guide, I talk about six issues I have with Apple CarPlay.

I also have other bones to pick, such as no video playback (even when the car is not running) and poor Voice Control, but leaks suggest these issues will be addressed in iOS 27, so I have not included them here.

Secondly, I’m talking about standard CarPlay, not CarPlay Ultra (currently only available on a few premium vehicles), as I haven’t had the opportunity to use the latter yet.

No multi-touch in Maps

One of the first things that frustrates me about using Apple Maps or Google Maps through CarPlay is having to use the four directional arrow buttons to move around the map on my car’s touchscreen.

On vehicles like my car with a small touchscreen, panning and exploring the map with those four buttons feels unnecessarily cumbersome.

I’d love to see Apple add multi-touch support to CarPlay, since navigation is one of the most frequently used functions on the car’s screen. And being able to pinch-to-zoom and freely move around the map would make the experience far more intuitive and efficient, like it is on Tesla cars.

Cannot remove Messages and Apple Maps from the car’s screen

By default, all installed iPhone apps that have a CarPlay version appear automatically on the vehicle screen. However, iOS allows removing all third-party apps, as well as some Apple apps like Audiobooks, Calendar, and Podcasts.

That said, Apple doesn’t allow removing their core apps, namely Messages, Phone, Music, Settings, Apple Maps, and Now Playing.

WhatsApp is the primary messaging app in my part of the world, and using iMessage, SMS, and RCS for communicating with friends and family is rare.

But Apple is rigid and doesn’t offer a way to remove Messages from the car’s screen (maybe the EU will intervene, and then they will).

Similarly, even if you prefer Spotify or YouTube Music and have no Apple Music subscription, there is no way to remove the iOS Music app from the CarPlay home screen to declutter it.

The same goes for Apple Maps! Why can’t I remove it? I only use Google Maps because it works many folds better in my country than Apple Maps!

Now, to be fair, if my car had a massive super-responsive touchscreen, I wouldn’t mind having some unnecessary apps there. But since my car’s screen is just 7 inches and not super responsive, I honestly hate seeing apps I never use take up screen real estate.

Cannot disable the old widgets screen

I don’t know if this affects all cars, but here’s my gripe.

Swiping left on the first Home Screen page in CarPlay mandatorily shows three widgets: Maps suggestions, Music, and Maps.

And these are not the new user-added CarPlay widgets introduced in iOS 26. These three widgets always appear there; I don’t find them useful; I never use them; but Apple doesn’t allow me to remove them.

This mandatory widget area forces me to make an extra swipe to reach the CarPlay widgets I specifically added.

No option to fully black out the screen while continuing music playback

My car’s infotainment system has a physical button that I can long-press to black out the screen, which is handy during night driving. It also has a less aggressive mode where the screen is fully black with a small clock in one corner of the screen.

Unfortunately, activating either of the above options takes me out of CarPlay. And even if I’m not using CarPlay and streaming music over Bluetooth, it stops the sound output completely.

I would love it if CarPlay had an option to make the car’s screen fully black while continuing music playback. This would mean I can enjoy music on night drives while keeping the screen black and not relying on my car’s poor infotainment system.

Connection issues

Despite using the same car for the last four years with no changes or updates to its infotainment system, CarPlay has not always been consistently reliable.

Problems crop up after an iOS software update or hardware upgrade, leading to random connection issues or requiring me to plug and unplug the cable multiple times for CarPlay to appear on the vehicle screen. Other times, I need to unlock my iPhone even though I have enabled ‘Allow CarPlay While Locked‘ in iOS Settings > General > CarPlay > my car.

And the old issue, where the music skips to the next track without fully playing to the end, persists in iOS 26.

No keyboard input in Apple Music

I understand that drivers shouldn’t be engaging much with the screen, and typing with an on-screen keyboard is definitely a major distraction.

That said, both Google Maps and Apple Maps allow you to type addresses using an on-screen keyboard. But the search button in Apple Music doesn’t, and the only way to find a song is by speaking to Siri.

This means that when I’m using CarPlay via my iPhone and my co-passenger wants to listen to something else, either I have to use Siri to find that song, or they have to hold my iPhone to my face to unlock it (which is dangerous), or I have to speak the passcode (a big security risk).

Of course, if the fellow passenger has an iPhone (no Apple Music subscription required), they can control music playback via SharePlay. But if they have an Android phone, the above problems hold true.

What issues do you have with CarPlay?

Also, check out: Tips to customize CarPlay for your vehicle

Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/07/09/carplay-issues-i-have/