My 2022 Subaru Outback head unit frequently crashes or is really unresponsive. My iPhone never crashes.
Car infotainment systems are garbage. I’d never buy a car without CarPlay. It’s maybe the #1 measure I have for vehicle quality when I rent on vacation.
So it seems that the more features I use via carplay the less it crashes. It's not perfect, but it certainly helps.
It’s really quite a shame as they’re fantastic cars otherwise. But yes, it’s never CarPlay that does it.
However my wife has an iPhone and although going next to the same antenna does crash the system as well, it does so very briefly and just resets the connection or something, and as soon as we go out of range it starts working again.
So it does look like there's some difference between CarPlay and Android Auto even when using the same exact car with both.
No idea why this happens and I can only assume the antenna is transmitting in a frequency that interferes with the wifi connection (it does not require a cable like older VW cars) which triggers a bug in the Android's stack, but Apple's stack seems more resilient somehow.
I would love to know if anyone else has had the same experience because I find it quite baffling and very annoying when I forget to disconnect my phone when going through that antenna.
Infotainment systems are prone to runtime errors and crashes, if you interact less with the internal workings of the infotainment system itself, it does a somewhat good job of just passing audio through and you have fewer sessions with a crash.
That said; i have noticed a disparity in what the infotainment gps navigation can do and what carplay can do- carplay is often limited to the center console, but the built-in navigation can go into the HUD of the car. An annoying difference.
On the other hand, the voice command system works as badly as it did when I got the car, while Siri has gotten worse.
I discovered not later than yesterday that if I plug a Nintendo Switch to one of the USB ports (to recharge it), the interface disappears.
And this is still one of the least garbage infotainment I had to endure to this day.
The insane lag to enter anything on google maps on my 2024 Yukon is ridiculous. Worse, the fact it makes me TYPE in the touchscreen instead of letting me do this on the phone is yet another reason to completely ditch it. Google could easily let me control it through the phone (as they do with youtube on my tv) but I doubt they care enough to do that.
It should be straightforward, pick a direction on my phone, beam to car, car opens it automatically in google maps. That is not difficult.
Also, the integration with the iphone was top-notch. It understood that the iphone provided navigation, so if I pressed the nav button while on the radio screen, it would activate google maps from the iphone. The only thing which wasn't great was typing in some long address, which is why I connected the iphone.
Rented some kind of Audi a few weeks later, and it had the usual crappy integration. "nav" is the car's laggy navigation, etc.
Result is that it's smooth like a tablet, even with it's quite large 12" screen. Been very pleased with it so far.
It also supports Android Auto and CarPlay though, something I had as a requirement.
[1]: https://9to5google.com/2021/09/06/android-automotive-renault...
I installed a new stereo for my old car today, intentionally avoided CarPlay and got a simple non-touchscreen JVC. $60, 15 minute DIY job, BT paired instantly, has aux too, and sounds great.
The point being, further hurt the sales of any cars like this, because really, it could be true.
That said, a car without CarPlay is simply out of the pool of possible cars I would buy. It's a requirement.
I don’t remember which specific brands had CarPlay and which ran their own infotainment systems, but I remember a couple years ago visiting dealerships of BMW/Mercedes/Honda/Toyota/Kia/Subaru/Ford and walking away either relieved that the car had CarPlay or internally cursing at their first-party infotainment system and promising myself to not even bother trying next time.
CarPlay and Android Auto give you the choice of your own app and full integration with the rest of your listening life.
And to be fair I prefer waze, not just because it makes driving simpler, but the community feeling you get by marking stopped cars or other obstructions on the road for others to pay attention to.
Unless automakers organize and come together to build a common os/ui layer, I don’t see apps like that ever being present in official infotainment systems.
And audio book apps change all the time too - local variants with local libraries, language learning apps etc. There is quite the variety of stuff you could do in a car.
And even if you want to use only audio and maps, then there are still a selection of audio streaming providers and map providers around.
Plus CarPlay it's pretty unstable and requires cable on some cars.
camping hiking etc bring me places without reception.
driving between towns here (BC, canada) often mean long stretches of road without reception.
After all, it’s just a protocol to let your phone use the display (or part of it) as a second monitor.
It’s been proven time and time again that vertical integration is a massive money earner and you can bet that if Tesla were to release a smartphone then support for that in their cars would be a software update that follows immediately after. But since there’s no plans for a phone, the next best thing is a subscription-based infotainment system.
I pay for premium data only because of Spotify and live traffic. Which I wouldn't have to do if it had CarPlay.
Source? I cannot find a single reference to Apple collecting fees, much less onerous fees, for implementing CarPlay functionality.
Automakers don’t like CarPlay because it makes cars fungible. I like CarPlay because it makes cars fungible. Apple seems like it would give away CarPlay (at least for now) to broaden the reach of its platform.