"Allow CarPlay While Locked" not reliable

[Doug Lass]

So, this is annoying. On iOS26, I do Settings>General>CarPlay>my car> and turn On "Allow CarPlay While Locked". That works only occasionally. Most of the time I have to manually unlock my phone to get CarPlay activated on my car. What's going on?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I've very suddenly been experiencing failures with CarPlay the past week as well. I plug it in and CarPlay fails to launch. Well I think technically it does... at least on my Pioneer unit, I can see the CarPlay icon if I use the switcher to see available input sources, but tapping on it does nothing. I have that same option to "Allow CarPlay While Locked" enabled, and while I haven't had an opportunity to troubleshoot this further, I'm wondering if this is where the failure is. Since I hadn't had a problem until the past week, I'm thinking this must have started with the 26.2.1 update.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I had some time to experiment some here. It had been about 18 hours since last driven and right off, CarPlay failed to open up properly. In my case, it failed when locked or unlocked despite repeated attempts which included plugging my iPhone in and out; trying another cable; and "forgetting" this car and setting CarPlay up again. Ultimately I was able to get it to work properly by doing a hard restart of the iPhone, but this process won't cut it long term. That's what it took the previous times this happened, and I don't think even that worked the first try on one of those times.

I decided to do a complete reinstall of iOS 26 with a restore of a backup made right beforehand since at this point that's all that's left to try. CarPlay did launch correctly when I retried it, but since the iPhone was freshly restarted as part of the reinstall/restore, I'm not prepared to say this cured the problem. I'll report back in a few days, sooner if the problem recurs.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Welp, the reinstall didn’t help. I had to reboot to get CarPlay to connect properly. Looks like we’re at the mercy of Apple getting their act together.

 

[Doug Lass]

I think your problem is very different than my problem. I have not trouble getting CarPlay to launch, but it always wants me to log in and get off my lock screen in order to do it. You might be better off creating a separate thread.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I think your problem is very different than my problem. I have not trouble getting CarPlay to launch, but it always wants me to log in and get off my lock screen in order to do it. You might be better off creating a separate thread.

Well starting off I thought maybe it was the same, but it turned out not to be. Anyway, I was engaged in general troubleshooting steps and sharing in the event it was useful.