I haven’t ranted for a while, so here’s something: my biggest gripe about Apple Carplay!

I basically need two things when I drive:

  • directions
  • and controls for what I am listening to.

But Carplay refuses to let these 2 essential things share the screen.

To add insult to injury, Carplay makes switching from one to the other especially hard!

For example, when on the “Now Playing” screen, I have an icon to go to Navigation: (so far, so good)

Now Playing… (an AudioBook)

But now, when on the Navigation screen, all I have is a completely useless compass in the place where you’d expect an icon to switch back to “Now Playing”:

Navigation Screen

In case you wonder why I can’t just use the car controls to skip to next and previous song, it is because I am not listening to songs! I am listening to Podcasts and Audiobooks. And for those, the controls you need the most are:

  • “I didn’t get that, rewind by 15 seconds”
  • “yada yada yada, skip forward 15 seconds” (also useful for boring commercials)

Now, after years of no change to this, I have a tiny tiny hope that the next version will finally solve this. Look at this screen from the WWDC Keynote:

WWDC 2016

The compass is gone! Yay! But did they replace it with a “Now Playing” icon when something is playing??