A few weeks ago, Apple debuted CarPlay Ultra. The catch: It rolled out in the not-so-ubiquitous brand, Aston Martin. Eventually, Apple says, this new software integration will come to cars in the Hyundai Group, including Kia and Genesis, but we don’t yet know when that will happen. But if you’re one of the 600 million users of CarPlay right now—and don’t happen to drive an Aston Martin, Apple still has good news for you.
Key Features Coming to CarPlay
- Quicker, emoji-like responses to incoming texts
- App prioritization/widget organization now closely mirrors the iPhone
- Answering incoming calls/texts will no longer block Apple Maps/Waze/Google Maps mapping
If that list sounds like jibberish (or Applespeak) to you, we’ll break it all down for you, including when, with the debut of iOS 26, these features will arrive.
Text Like An iPhone User
Responding to a text with a quick emoji is pretty common to do on your phone. Previously, however, this was impossible if you paired your iPhone to your car. The way a lot of drivers handle this is by talking to Siri, and having the phone try to figure out the gist of your response—often, unsuccessfully.
But with the new iPhone operating system, iOS 26, Apple solves this by allowing what it calls “Tapbacks,” which are quick responses to texts like a heart or thumbs-up or thumbs-down emoji. As with other changes, incoming texts no longer take over the entire screen, so whatever app you were running in the background, such as mapping, continues to dominate the background, and the incoming text appears as a pop-up window against that dominant background.
Widgets, in Apple vernacular, allow a different sort of sift of the apps on your iPhone. So, you might have a widget for weather that shows you the current forecast on your iPhone even when it’s locked. You might have several widgets do this, showing you news headlines, sports scores, weather, as well as upcoming events or calendar alerts.
Apple says iOS 26 will allow you to do the same thing with CarPlay, setting up a view that shows you apps or devices connected to your home, such as a thermostat you want to turn down before you arrive (connected to Apple’s Home app), a calendar view, and then other apps as well off to the side of the display.
Yes, Apple CarPlay currently allows you to customize what apps appear, but the ability to rearrange what matters to you, and to also see items at a larger and smaller scale, hasn’t been available.
We’re betting Apple adds yet more modularity and customization to CarPlay from here onwards.
A Better OS
In addition to a system that allows texts or calls to come through without making background mapping invisible, iOS 26 now enables you to run what it calls “Live Activities” on a nested screen. That’s sports scores; some parking garage/parking meter apps that count down; the timing of someone’s incoming flight or train or bus arrival as you’re heading to fetch them; or a food delivery you want to beat home so you’re there to receive it. There are a lot of apps that enable Live Activities on the iPhone, including news headlines, and we can envision wanting certain kinds of messaging (like an app your kid’s school uses or your job uses) to populate the CarPlay screen, too.
Prioritized Group Texts
You almost certainly have group text threads that are a sustained form of chat with your family, friends, work colleagues, book club or exercise club hangouts, etc. CarPlay will now enable “pinning” that conversation to the home screen, so that it sticks around, and you don’t have to paw through a bunch of more recent texts to get back to that family thread. Obviously, being able to fire back a quick emoji to the entire group also makes this communication less distracting, and the whole idea of these more smartly delineated ways to view CarPlay should (we hope) be around efficient, rather than distracting usage.
TopSpeed’s Take
CarPlay with iOS 26 will be out this fall. When it arrives, it will also include a function we’ve wanted for years—inverting the background screen to black at night. But CarPlay Ultra on more cars will still be better. Apple has already shown how this refined ecosystem can work, using the instrument cluster as well as the center-stack display for simplified controls of climate, adaptive cruise, seat heaters, entertainment, and everything else you use regularly in a car.
This can even work with Google Built-in and Android Auto, because while that tech giant is great at systems integration, Apple is just in more drivers’ pockets, and we’re used to iconography. That means it would just be better (way, way, way better) than carmakers trying to, er, reinvent the wheel. Apple and Google “own” the display real estate. And as much as carmakers would prefer we pay them for apps, their best bet will be charging us subscriptions for connectivity like in-car 5G plans, not the infotainment realm they still can’t seem to get right.
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