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iOS 18.4 Includes a Small But Useful Change for CarPlay

Never used any icon on carplay home screen, carplay is only usefull for navigation and listening music. For this you need exactly two icons...

(The 3rd usage would be phone calling, but that only works on phones with english locale. There is no siri support for my language, and it is impossible to search the phone book in carplay: each time you type a letter in the search bar carplay jumps to a different letter. I think this is true for any latin type alphabet with more than 25 letters. This bug is present from the first version of carplay, and seems apple cannot fix it.)
 
tomdar2 said:
Find My should be on Car Play. How it isn’t is baffling.
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I think there's an incarnation kind of there... When I went out the other day I needed to pick up my wife who was dropped off nowhere close to where she was going. When picking her back up, I could see her location right on the Carplay map.
 
I bought a new vehicle with Google Built-In and it is essentially an Android tablet on the dash. I can run CarPlay on the system but It's really pointless except for Apple Music. Google maps is superior to Apple Maps and all my contacts and calendar information is shared between my Apple and Google platforms so I have everything I need with the vehicles built in system and its tied far more closely to the vehicles digital instrument cluster and other internal systems for voice control (HVAC, external smart home control, vehicle operations etc..).

CarPlay 2 is essentially Apples implementation of Google Built-In. I could be superior to Google Built-In and Apple could have been competitive here but they are losing ground quickly. Long term the old CarPlay/Android Auto "bolt on" to the vehicle system will fade away. It was an interim solution. The vehicle will have the integrated infotainment ecosystem tightly integrated with its internal systems.
 
My Bolt EUV has a nice big screen with roughly the same look as the original post's image. No third row for me.
 
DogHouseDub said:
Why isn't there a scaled version of CarPlay that can run on the iPhone display itself?
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This -- or something like it -- would be really useful riding a motorcycle. Those enormous icons would certainly be easier to mash with gloves on. The Zumo + iOS integration has improved significantly but there are a few use cases (selecting a podcast for instance) where a better interface on the phone would go a long way. It'd also be kind of swanky to have a big button to snap a picture.
 
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my Mum’s 2024 Renault Captur, iOS 18.3.1

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macjaffa said:
Dude the whole reason of operation for findmy doesn’t revolve soley around your use case. Jeez…. Plenty of people use it to find other people and the ability to immediately start directions to that person is very useful indeed, its not all about finding your lost airpods. Christ almighty..


In saying that one thing they could do to improve this is either or add the following: update the gps directions as the other person moves, and b) offer a kind of calculated midway point that allows bith people to meet with minimal travel time for both. Soo if we are 50 miles apart it picks a good location 25 miles between and send directions toneach other. Bonus points if it could determine a good location and not just a point on a road somewhere. Thatvwould require serious apple intelligence and a 16gb reserved iphone v20 probably. Wve been waiting years already for this feature.
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ive been complaining about this FOREVER. I often use findmy to meet a friend but its annoying that it doesnt have live data, you have to keep refreshing it. If either take a wrong turn its beyond annoying to try and find your way to somewhere in the middle. Basically drop a pin and hope for the best LOL
 
I still can't believe that I can sort albums by release date on my iPhone but the second I plug it into my vehicle, albums are only listed alphabetically. It's infuriating how poorly the Music app is designed within CarPlay.
 
montuori said:
This -- or something like it -- would be really useful riding a motorcycle. Those enormous icons would certainly be easier to mash with gloves on. The Zumo + iOS integration has improved significantly but there are a few use cases (selecting a podcast for instance) where a better interface on the phone would go a long way. It'd also be kind of swanky to have a big button to snap a picture.
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also complain about this, there used to be a decent app that emulated carplay that I would use on my motorcycle when I could jailbreak my iphone, but thats long gone and I dont want to pay $100+ for a carplay device for my motorcycle that I have to worry about someone trying to steal off it or having to take it off the bike every time i get off.
 
SkippyThorson said:
Here's a primary example:
With a couple of taps, you're in Find My, select your out of town relative, request directions.
Boom, you're on the highway to Grandmother's house.

Here's another:
Where does my AirTag for my wallet say it is?
Oh crap, that little shop we hit after the restaurant.
Tap, directions back to my wallet without an address.

Just because something doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it doesn't work for someone else.
The point of CarPlay is to leave the phone down in the console or in your pocket.
If you can pick up your phone for all of those features, what is CarPlay's purpose at all then; by your logic?
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CarPlay's purpose is to provide a subset of the phone's functions that pertain to navigation, audio playback and phone calls, optimized for use by a driver in a moving vehicle and offering a minimum of distraction to get the job done. If you put Find My (or whatever else) on the CarPlay screen, some percentage of drivers will futz with that interface while driving.

So it gets relegated to something you do on your phone, where you can pull over, get the location of the object you're tracking and start navigation right there on your phone. After all, if you "need" to use the CarPlay screen to get directions to your wallet, do you also now "need" CarPlay to let you look up movie times since you'll be driving to the theater? How about StubHub, or Resy? Should those be on CarPlay as well, since you may well be navigating to your game or dinner?

What Apple is doing, rightly IMO, is to draw a line and limit activities you can do on the CarPlay interface. Obviously nobody (except the cops, if they do their job) can stop you or anyone else from whipping out your phone and doing whatever you want while driving -- but Apple is trying to limit CarPlay to the essentials here and avoid mission creep.
 
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ignatius345 said:
CarPlay's purpose is to provide a subset of the phone's functions that pertain to navigation, audio playback and phone calls, optimized for use by a driver in a moving vehicle and offering a minimum of distraction to get the job done. If you put Find My (or whatever else) on the CarPlay screen, some percentage of drivers will futz with that interface while driving.

So it gets relegated to something you do on your phone, where you can pull over, get the location of the object you're tracking and start navigation right there on your phone. After all, if you "need" to use the CarPlay screen to get directions to your wallet, do you also now "need" CarPlay to let you look up movie times since you'll be driving to the theater? How about StubHub, or Resy? Should those be on CarPlay as well, since you may well be navigating to your game or dinner?

What Apple is doing, rightly IMO, is to draw a line and limit activities you can do on the CarPlay interface. Obviously nobody (except the cops, if they do their job) can stop you or anyone else from whipping out your phone and doing whatever you want while driving -- but Apple is trying to limit CarPlay to the essentials here and avoid mission creep.
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Find my is literally 3 clicks to get directions to someone vs opening maps, trying to use voice and it not doing it correctly followed by having to type out the address since they could be at an address not saved in your phone which then takes up waaay more attention and is far more distracting having to glance back and forth from the road to the keyboard with each keypress.
 
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Kar98 said:
Apple Maps navigation, messages being read out loud to me, Apple Music, audio books from Libby, phone calls...
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I think I only have the calendar app on my second page. And that’s only because I can’t delete it. I have Apple and google maps, Apple Music and Spotify, call and message app and my cars app. I think that’s all I use. I think I’d prefer to have more spaced apps and put the ones I can’t delete on the second page. Hopefully this is an option.
 
lk400 said:
I think I only have the calendar app on my second page. And that’s only because I can’t delete it. I have Apple and google maps, Apple Music and Spotify, call and message app and my cars app. I think that’s all I use. I think I’d prefer to have more spaced apps and put the ones I can’t delete on the second page. Hopefully this is an option.
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I'm surprised you can't delete Calendar.
 
This iOS update broke my CarPlay. It was working fine last week. I did update to iOS 18.4 and today morning my phone didn’t connect to the cars infotainment and the infotainment gave me a connection error. I will try to set up again CarPlay and hopefully that fixes it.

EDIT: removing everything and setting up CarPlay again resolved my issue. Everything works including Siri with the new animation ☺️
 

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w_macintosh said:
ive been complaining about this FOREVER. I often use findmy to meet a friend but its annoying that it doesnt have live data, you have to keep refreshing it. If either take a wrong turn its beyond annoying to try and find your way to somewhere in the middle. Basically drop a pin and hope for the best LOL
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yeah totally. It's a strange thing becuase this is almost the ideal scenario for the utility of the find my app. Otherwise I can just use any old gps map app if im navigating to a fixed point. But navigating to a point that is constantly changing, that find my has access to this data, but doesn't actually do anything with is a totally non-apple thing. This should have been a Launch Day feature for this app. But we're still waiting. Useless.
 
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ExAndroidUsr said:
This iOS update broke my CarPlay. It was working fine last week. I did update to iOS 18.4 and today morning my phone didn’t connect to the cars infotainment and the infotainment gave me a connection error. I will try to set up again CarPlay and hopefully that fixes it.

EDIT: removing everything and setting up CarPlay again resolved my issue. Everything works including Siri with the new animation ☺️
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Stop using beta builds, then if you dont want it to break. Part of using beta build experience is that things will break, so this is normal
 
MacRumorsGuest said:
I still can't believe that I can sort albums by release date on my iPhone but the second I plug it into my vehicle, albums are only listed alphabetically. It's infuriating how poorly the Music app is designed within CarPlay.
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another great example of how car play is some weird gimped up shizzle. I really dont know why they have this two tier sort of system. All it does is drive people back to using their phones, becuase car play is broken, worse or useless compared to a phone in a mount.
 
macjaffa said:
Stop using beta builds, then if you dont want it to break. Part of using beta build experience is that things will break, so this is normal
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I am using dev betas for years and this was the second small issue during that period. Love to get the new features quicker and I solved this issue quickly.
 
Sorry to break this, but this is not a new feature.
It has been this way for a while.

Currently on IOS 18.3.1, but has been this way since I got the car in August 2024.
Mercedes EQS with Hyperscreen.

IMG_0841.jpg
 
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