CarPlay in iOS 26 — 5 biggest upgrades coming to your car
We've picked out the five biggest upgrades coming to your cars and how they'll affect your next drive starting in the fall, when Apple's updated software is slated to get a full release.
Several Apple apps are getting improvements in CarPlay, but I do want to highlight some from apps you're more likely to use often while driving.
Maps will add multitouch support for vehicles that have multitouch displays. Meanwhile, Messages will gain the ability to perform a tapback, meaning you can select a quick response, rather than speaking out loud to return texts. This should let you focus more on the road rather than coming up with a reply as you drive.
Additionally, phones will no longer go into full screen mode when you make or receive calls. Instead, the call will appear in a compact widget so that you can still see other apps like Apple Maps.
Perhaps the biggest and most obvious upgrade to CarPlay is the new Liquid Glass aesthetic that Apple is introducing to across its operating systems. Within the new design, you can customize the icons in clear, dark, and default appearances. Dark mode puts the usual icon symbols on dark backgrounds.
In clear mode, the CarPlay icons turn somewhat transparent, with an etched-glass look. Additionally, the Clear look comes with several variants: Light, Dark, and Auto.
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We've tested the new design, and my colleague John Velasco prefers it in CarPlay compared to how it functions on iPhones, citing 'the bubble that surrounds the three menu icons' for showcasing 'better separation between the … layers' of Liquid Glass elements.
Included with the CarPlay iOS 26 update are some new wallpapers that are reminiscent of the new default iPhone wallpaper. Disappointingly it doesn't look like you'll be able to select your own photos as a backdrop.
Introduced on iPhones and Apple Watch with iOS 16, Live Activities will make their way to CarPlay, iPad, and Mac via macOS Tahoe and iPadOS 26.
If you have Live Activities on your iPhone, they'll now display in your CarPlay interface, which you can use to track things like flights, sports scores, and timers, to name a few examples.
Apple announced that CarPlay was getting video playback during June's WWDC 2025 event. The feature will only be available when the car is not driving and set in park.
When your car is parked, you should be able to stream a video to your vehicle's display via third-party apps like YouTube. The feature wasn't available when we tested the iOS 26 developer beta, so we haven't seen it in action yet. But we're hoping it works well.
The rumored CarPlay 2.0 was supposed to introduce widgets to the interface, but that ended up delayed multiple times before turning into CarPlay Ultra. However, it appears the standard CarPlay won't be left behind.
Now you'll be able to include widgets of various Apple apps from a dedicated panel in CarPlay. For example, we were able to make the clock more prominent and select styles that we found more legible. Other options include calendar events, battery status indicators and smart home controls.
There are other features we'd like to see, including better integration with non-Apple apps like Google Maps, but the new interface is impressive and seems built to help you configure it in a way that best suits your driving needs.
Right now, all of Apple's OS upgrades are in beta form, but come the fall, around the same time of the expected iPhone 17 release, look for CarPlay to arrive with the upgrades detailed here.
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