CarPlay in iOS 26: The MacStories Review

When CarPlay Ultra was announced… checks notes… three years ago, it was a bold vision for the future of in-car displays. There was as much drooling over the new designs as there was skepticism over whether any car manufacturer would agree to such an extensive display overhaul.

Underneath all that, there were also some concerns about where this left regular, vanilla CarPlay. The kind that many people had fallen in love with, and which was often a prerequisite when buying a new car. Was this going away, or would it just be left to wither on the vine?

Thankfully, with iOS 26, the answer seems to be a firm “no” as Apple brings much more customization to our in-car displays, mainly by letting the much heralded features of CarPlay Ultra trickle down to regular CarPlay. There’s more than you’d think, so let’s take a look.

Design

Liquid Glass is across CarPlay and it looks great.

Firstly, CarPlay has taken on the visual qualities of Liquid Glass. Since CarPlay is essentially a mirror for your iPhone, this is to be expected, but it’s been done in a way that hasn’t created any legibility issues. You’ll notice the new design in areas like the more rounded corners of app windows, the dock, and toggle switches in Settings. It’s nice, and it brings a fresh, gentle new look to your car.

All the different icon options available.

You can also change the icons on the Home Screen just as you can on your iPhone. So if you want all clear icons, now you can. Dark icons are also an option, which have come along for the ride (pun intended) with a new dark mode (which can be automatic based on lighting, or forced). I’ve been running dark mode in CarPlay on my VW iD3 all summer, and it’s been an incredible upgrade for legibility and ease of use. The combination of darker backgrounds and crisp white text makes things easier to glance at. Something increasingly important as our in-car entertainment systems become more feature-rich and distracting. More on that in a minute.

You can increase the text size.

But it might get a bit cramped.

Legibility issues can be further improved with a new Large Text option. Quite simply, it makes text larger system-wide in 100, 110, 120, and 135% increments. While this is good to have, what’s stopped me from increasing my text size is that very implementation: system-wide.

In some places, such as the Now Playing screen, it’s great, making it much easier to glance at the screen and see what track is playing. However, in other areas, it makes the content more cramped and harder to read. So while it’s a welcome addition, a per-app option would be better.

Display Zoom has mixed results for different people.

Lastly, Smart Display Zoom aims to resize elements of the UI to better fit your car’s screen. It’s unclear how it determines this, and I’ve seen as many people have their UI reduced as have their UI increased in size, which is what happened to me. Unfortunately, this made apps like Maps difficult to use, so I turned it off. It’s certainly worth checking out, but as with mine, you might not get the result you want.

Live Activities

A Live Activity in CarPlay. Source: Apple.

iOS 26 brings Live Activities to CarPlay. This means that any Live Activity showing on your iPhone will now show up when you are in multi-view mode, along with any maps and music playback. This could be useful, for instance, for tracking how far through a flight a family member you’re picking up is, using Flighty. Still, it’s the start of a worrying trend through CarPlay where there are more detailed distractions on screen that promise to take your attention away from the road, where it should be.

A Flighty Live Activity might be helpful, but other Live Activities could be terrible. Take, for instance, Sports Alerts, an excellent live sports scores app. On iOS, they have great Live Activities. However, when transferred to the CarPlay interface, the details become difficult to read without staring intently at them. Before you know it, you’ve had your eyes off the road for more than the recommended two seconds maximum.

Additionally, Live Activities seem unreliable in their presence, at least for me. So much so that I haven’t been able to get any to show up since the public release of iOS 26. Hopefully, this is just a minor bug that needs fixing.

Widgets

Probably the headline feature for CarPlay on iOS 26, widgets are something that has trickled down from CarPlay Ultra. CarPlay has created a new screen that you can access by swiping right from the multi-view layout. On this screen, you can have either one or two stacks of widgets (depending on your screen size).

An easy way to set up your widgets in CarPlay.

Thankfully, you arrange and add to these stacks from Settings > General > CarPlay > (Your Car) > Widgets on your iPhone, which offers a much better experience than it would have been on the car’s screen. (While we’re here, can we have this approach for organising Standby widgets, please?)

You can add up to 5 small widgets from any app on your iPhone that offers them. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that you can add a widget for a third-party app and not be tied to Apple’s versions of Calendar, Weather, and others.

These do nothing. Zilch.

The bad news is, literally any widget can be added. This means interactive widgets that use an area of the widget to jump into a specific place in an app are rendered useless. I tried to get ChatGPT to enter voice mode by tapping the button in the widget, but it didn’t respond. Instead, it opened the app when I unlocked my iPhone 10 minutes later.

Don’t try this at home.

This slapdash approach of just adding every widget is both frustrating and possibly dangerous. An app called Dynamic Lyrics offers a fun widget for your iPhone that displays live lyrics for the currently playing song. Unfortunately, this is now available on CarPlay, meaning that, if you were thoughtless enough, you could have lyrics scrolling up your CarPlay screen while you drive.

I’m sure the fine readers of MacStories are not going to be so reckless as to do such a thing, but someone will. And that makes the road less safe for others.

Widgets can be very functional in CarPlay.

Yet there are some great uses for widgets in CarPlay. Adding a Home Widget with a big chunky button for closing your garage door is a great use case. Alternatively, the Apple Music widget allows you to hit play without navigating to the Music app.

The widgets screen can thus become a much more calming default. I don’t have the need to put on some music or have a visible map every time I drive my car, so having a nice analog clock widget paired with a weather widget is so much nicer than my default VW Home Screen or CarPlay app screen.

My calming default screen.

On the whole, widgets in CarPlay are a win if you’re selective about how you use them, but Apple really needs to rein in the free-for-all access that every app on your iPhone has.

Messages

Pinned Messages. Source: Apple.

Messages in CarPlay now supports your pinned conversations, which is great for the groups you frequent the most and helps reduce the need for scrolling to access them. This is a step forward in reducing interactions while driving, but what pinned conversations give, tapbacks take away. Yes, Tapbacks are now available on CarPlay, and it’s as bad as you can imagine.

Tapbacks in CarPlay. Don’t try this at home either. Source: Apple.

When receiving a message in the Messages app, after Siri reads it, you will get the option to Tapback alongside the usual Reply and Call buttons. Tapping on this will surface the usual heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, haha, exclamation mark, and question mark, where you can tap on your choice. They are tiny.

When Apple announced this, I was honestly shocked. Asking drivers to interact with their display more and further distract them from the road is quite reckless, and I’d advise against using these altogether.

Additional Tidbits

An incoming phone call is now very non-intrusive.

Incoming calls now appear as a pop-up notification instead of taking over the whole screen. This is especially welcome when you’re following a map route and someone calls.

When your iPhone is paired to your car and you take a screenshot, by default, you will not get a screenshot of your CarPlay screen. You can turn this option back on in your car’s CarPlay settings.

If you have it turned on, Sound Recognition will now alert you if it detects the sound of a baby crying. An excellent feature that those with hearing issues will, I’m sure, welcome while driving with an infant.

You can clear any Live Activities or Calendar events that appear in the grid view. Useful for freeing up space, but you can also keep private events off your screen that you might not want passengers to see.

If you have a screen that supports it, Maps now has multitouch, allowing you to pinch to zoom to your heart’s delight.

CarPlay on iOS 26 brings some new wallpapers, and you can even turn them off completely.

Although I don’t think many cars support this feature, if you have the required hardware, you can now AirPlay video content to your car’s screen. Thankfully, this option is only available when your vehicle is parked.

Conclusion

CarPlay on iOS 26 is a sizable update, with some really great enhancements that make it easier, quicker, and clearer to use. Unfortunately, these updates are hindered by new additions that encourage more interaction and attention while driving.

When Apple launched CarPlay and enabled third-party apps to join in, they made sure – and still do – that inappropriate content like video apps was not allowed. Apple’s recent update to its Sports app does not allow its lovely new widget on CarPlay, so it would seem Apple is still thinking deeply about safety in cars. That makes it all the more baffling and frustrating that any app can add seemingly any widget to a CarPlay interface.

That, on top of the frankly dangerous addition of Tapbacks in Messages, puts Apple’s claim that CarPlay is “the smarter, safer way to use iPhone while driving” on shaky ground.

There is a real need to make car infotainment systems safer to use, and Apple has the technology and influence to build a platform that helps achieve that goal, while still allowing users to be very connected to their iPhone and media. However, they seem to be fumbling the play, which is disappointing to say the least.

Nevertheless, if you are aware of these flaws by ignoring Tapbacks and using appropriate widgets, CarPlay for iOS 26 is an excellent update that, thankfully, shows Apple is not moving all its focus to CarPlay Ultra.

iOS 26 is available as a free update now. Check out Federico’s full review for everything else you can expect.