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