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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I largely ignored CarPlay since it came out since my car didn't support it and I didn't feel like I was missing much vs my mounted phone but recently I borrowed a car for a few days that had CarPlay and I really enjoyed it. So much better than anything from any car manufacturer and the integration was flawless. In fact, my biggest issue was figuring out how to get back into the CarPlay UI from the car default UI when I started the car (I'm sure there was an easy way and I took a convoluted way).

For a long time I said "Just give me keyless entry/start, bluetooth, and a backup camera and I'll be happy" but now I really want CarPlay as well. The car I was driving was much nicer than mine in a number of ways (adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, etc, all stuff I enjoyed) but CarPlay was the one thing I'd really love to have.

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Does carplay hijack the phone pretty aggressively? I've tried the Android one a few times, but it prevents manipulation of the phone while you're riding and the phone has to ask of the head unit (and be rejected) permission to disable Bluetooth to restore the phone. Then you have to ask the driver to get, unlock, and relinquish his phone for you to accomplish the task.

It's possible I was the victim of bad default settings, as I turned the whole thing off each time after this happened.

IME the iPhone works normally, but if you have a navigation app running a route that app turns into a list of the next steps with no options to view a map, add a stop, or manipulate anything.

It's really frustrating for us when, e.g. we have the route to the final destination on screen but the passenger wants to look for a place to stop and eat. They either have to use the car touchscreen (intended for the driver and limiting for someone who can give it full attention) or juggle multiple maps apps or phones.

It used to, but a few years ago (2019 I think?) they changed so that it's a properly separate display.

The only thing you can't do is separately play audio from the phone (because the CarPlay unit is basically serving as its output while it's connected), or use your maps app to do something different while the navigation is running on the CarPlay unit (because CarPlay is just a view into the phone's apps, and so they'll both be in navigation mode).

CarPlay is awesome, but I found the lack of being able to use maps very restricting. If you’re driving with someone who is co-piloting then them being able to use your phone to scout ahead for stops, restaurants etc is really useful.

We ended up using Google Maps for this while navigating with Apple Maps.

Yeah or they can just use their own phone

Not sure how juggling two phones, then having to manually copy addresses with potentially foreign characters between them is better.

No, just let me view the damn map on my phone and the car display?

It's strange to me that Apple Maps is the only app I know of that works this way.

It used to work as more of a screen mirror (e.g. if the passenger changes apps on the phone the CarPlay screen would change as well) but they updated it a few years ago and now they are totally independent, except there’s only one “version” of each app so if you change the navigation destination on the phone it’ll change on the CarPlay screen.

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