Complete Guide to Setting up Apple CarPlay
If you have an iPhone and a car dashboard that supports this technology, you should use Apple CarPlay on the road. It brings many of your iPhone apps to your car’s big screen, most notably Apple Maps, Google Maps, and the apps you use to play music and podcasts.
While CarPlay works great in its default configuration, you can customize it in a variety of ways, which I’ll explain here. If you spend a lot of time on the road, it makes sense to customize the interface to suit you. Assuming you’ve gone through the initial connection process , here’s what you can change to suit your needs.
How to set up Apple CarPlay in your car
Down in the bottom corner of the CarPlay interface is an icon that changes shape depending on the screen you’re on, but always looks like a combination of black squares and rectangles. Tap it to switch between the app drawer and the CarPlay home screen with widgets (usually a map app and a media app). In the US this icon is on the left, but if you’re in a right-hand drive car like in my screenshots, it’s on the right.
To open a specific app in full screen mode, select it from the left sidebar or app drawer: this gives you more options (for example, the ability to zoom in and out on the map on the screen). You can also tap on an app in the Widgets view to expand it to full screen—again, use the icon in the bottom left to return to Widgets.
Tap the Settings app in the app drawer or sidebar (the one that looks like a bunch of gears) and you can change some aspects of how CarPlay looks and works. First up is Driving Focus , which works as a special Do Not Disturb mode when you’re in the car. If you want, you can automatically turn on Driving Focus when you connect CarPlay (and adjust these settings through your iPhone).
Tap Announce Messages to control whether Siri reads messages as they arrive on your phone—which you may find useful or an unnecessary distraction. Additional Siri options can be found in the Siri and Suggestions sections of the main Settings menu. For example, you can ask Siri to send messages you dictate, with or without confirmation.
In the Appearance and Wallpaper section, you can change the appearance of CarPlay on your dashboard screen. For example, you can always turn on dark mode, and there are 11 different wallpaper options to choose from – none of them are particularly detailed, but you won’t spend much time looking at them anyway.
The last option in Settings is Show Album Art , which is a simple toggle for the Now Playing screen (which you’ll find in the app drawer). This Now Playing screen appears when playing any media file in any app, giving a consistent look to the playback interface and controls.
How to set up CarPlay on your iPhone
Take out your iPhone (if you’re not driving) to further set up CarPlay. For example, tap Focus & Drive on the iOS Settings screen to change the setting for this mode, which can be turned on automatically when you start driving. You can control which notifications appear when you’re on the go and set up an automatic reply to a text message if needed.
Select General and CarPlay in iOS settings and then select your car and you can choose whether CarPlay will connect automatically when your iPhone is present and that specific car starts up. You might prefer to launch CarPlay manually from your car’s dashboard if you don’t want it to activate every time you drive.
Select Customize and you can choose which apps appear in the CarPlay dashboard and in what order. This isn’t a list of every app on your iPhone, just the ones that work with CarPlay. You can use the markers on the right to change their order and the buttons on the left to add or remove them.
You don’t necessarily want every CarPlay-compatible app on your iPhone to actually show up in your car. If there are certain ones that you’re never going to use, then they’re just adding clutter (which you don’t want in a car interface). But some of these apps, including Apple Maps and Messages, cannot be uninstalled.