Driving a relatively modern car, plugging in a thousand-dollar phone, and staring at an interface that somehow looks worse than the phone itself can lead to a certain kind of frustration. For many, CarPlay has been that experience; it’s functional, sure, but aesthetically stuck around 2016, with icons that seem to have been taken from a time when skeuomorphism was still being discussed in design circles. The changes, at least in theory, are more ambitious than anything Apple has attempted with CarPlay since its launch under the somewhat awkward name “iOS in the Car” back in 2014. iOS 26 appears determined to address that.
According to Apple, over 600 million people use CarPlay every day. It’s hard to fully understand that figure, which may be why it’s been easy to ignore how stagnant the experience has felt in comparison to how much the iPhone has changed. The new design language that comes with iOS 26, which Apple is referring to as “Liquid Glass,” aligns CarPlay’s menus and icons with the phone’s overall visual makeover. It also adds appropriate support for light and dark mode and generally makes the dashboard feel like it belongs in the same decade as the surrounding hardware. It feels like a long overdue refresh, and it’s difficult not to question why it took so long.
However, the new features are far more significant than the aesthetic adjustments. With iOS 26, CarPlay will get Live Activities, a feature that allows you to monitor ongoing events, such as a flight’s arrival time, a food delivery approaching, or a sports score. Demos of a flight-tracking widget that sits neatly next to audio and navigation and updates in real time when conditions change have been shown by Apple. This is really helpful for anyone who has ever been caught trying to squint at a phone while keeping their eyes on the road at an airport. However, only months of actual use will verify whether it functions as smoothly in real life as it does in the demo videos.
Most drivers will likely notice the widget system change first. Regardless of whether an iPhone app has built-in CarPlay support or not, Apple is enabling users to create widgets for almost any app. That’s a significant platform opening. In the past, CarPlay’s utility was mostly restricted to what developers decided to optimize for the in-car setting. Drivers no longer need to pick up their phones to access glanceable information from a greater variety of apps, such as productivity tools and the weather. The amount of information that is truly safe to display while driving is a legitimate question, and Apple may encounter opposition on that front. However, it appears to be a real improvement for the time being.
Although it is a more subdued addition, Smart Display Zoom shows that Apple is paying more attention to the variety of CarPlay configurations found in real life. CarPlay operates on a wide range of in-car displays; some are tall and narrow, others are wide and horizontal, and many don’t precisely match the aspect ratio that standard CarPlay layouts assume. Nestled under Display in CarPlay’s Settings app, Smart Display Zoom aims to optimize the interface layout for the particular screen it is operating on. Although it’s off by default and Apple admits that not all cars have it, it’s worth checking if your CarPlay setup has always felt a little out of place on your screen.
The smaller features include resizable text, new wallpapers, and the ability to drag and drop apps in CarPlay straight from your phone’s settings. The “biggest CarPlay overhaul in years” narrative that has been going around is not supported by any of these on its own. When taken as a whole, however, they point to something different: Apple is finally treating CarPlay as a product that merits real iteration rather than sporadic maintenance. Observing all of this, it seems that the company has come to the realization that its in-car experience was falling short in areas that were important to many. Although it’s still unclear if iOS 26 completely closes that gap, it’s unquestionably Apple’s most serious attempt to do so.⁖※
