Apple Carplay Conundrums
Apple CarPlay, a technological marvel designed to unite your car with the digital world, often feels like a frustrating relationship, more bad date than a harmonious dance of digits. How many times have we started our cars, eagerly anticipating our favorite playlists or directions to the next coffee place, only to face the silent treatment from the infotainment screen? That sleek dashboard, once a portal to convenient control, suddenly becomes an unresponsive, dull panel. This all too frequent reality for Apple CarPlay users across a diverse car manufactures seems at odds with Apple’s high end brand proposition.
This isn’t a small thing or isolated hiccup. According to recent statistics, a sizable fraction of car owners are abandoning the OEM’s often awkward systems for the elegance of Apple CarPlay. Their enthusiasm and the expectation, that a system like CarPlay, so often lauded for its ease, ought to just work — it often is not met, and that does make one think, maybe our lives are just not what the brochures promise. People want their maps, they crave their music, their podcasts or audiobooks to follow the turns and the twists and turns on a Sunday road trip, they have places to be — and yet, this magic mirror of the phone so often throws you an error or an silent screen. Connectivity, or rather the lack of it, causes stress that could well be avoided with better technology or better explanations of the underlying tech. Many find they’re caught between a beloved phone that insists on ignoring that fact there is an attached car present.
The challenges seem endless, like an old arcade game that keeps coming back for more. Let’s consider our list of typical issues:
- Cables can be finicky. A frayed wire might be the equivalent of the tech-world’s hangnail, making something as straightforward as charging feel like attempting a delicate surgery.
- Software. That’s where one expects updates should deliver on their promise of increased harmony between different systems, however, updates of the very popular OS version often present connectivity conundrums. There are also older software releases for cars that can refuse communication and throw in weird glitches.
- System Integration. Sometimes it’s like different nations trying to work together with language barriers. You might think that with BMWs for instance, enabling Bluetooth, Wifi and even Siri (all at the same time, that is!) seems like some ancient arcane ceremony to make carplay work, but that’s how a lot of people are supposed to make a connection actually work — a weird tech-sacrafice indeed.
There also an odd sense of being stuck in no-man’s land of tech. Phone connected — great, but without carplay functional? Frustrating at best! Screen Permissions ignored, connections going wrong… It’s enough to make you miss the days when you just turned on your car radio without a thought of these weird, very modern difficulties.
These challenges leave many drivers to their own devices for quick remedies. Phone restarts, or double checking permissions or settings for Bluetooth seem like basic steps when faced with an unruly system like this, that is, until you find that you are simply repeating those very steps over and over. And still, issues seem to keep coming.
The modern user experience today, should allow anyone to just jump in a car and start going and playing! With so much development resources allocated to new product developments in cars as well as software, why is this area of daily routine suffering? Well, we’ve learned one single, very simple solution which requires zero time or development time at all, and also no real “tech” skill…
The Reconnect Ritual
It’s actually shockingly simple — it is almost so stupid it is brilliant.
The trick is this: Go into your iOS settings. Find Carplay settings there, then… Simply turn off Carplay, immediately turning it right back on again, thus re-enabling this system in iOS. Think of this action as digital deep breath, a small yet efficient moment of a system wide reevaluation. The digital connections — previously like stubborn house plants — just seem to start flowing again. The phone, your car, now recognize and reestablish the links and connections that previously just flat refused to exist — and so suddenly — boom — it works, again.
You should do this “ritual” when you see your screen stubbornly displaying a car logo when you’re already inside, or have some audio weirdness or lack of response on the console’s part. This reset — the re-establishment of the digital handshake that seems to solve most CarPlay connectivity troubles seems strange and simple all the same time, but seems to work in the vast majority of instances when the technology refuses to behave as it is expected to do so. A silent screen can mean trouble and now there is a really easy path to fix it! This very simple procedure seems to fix a lot of “interstitial-friction” and this small reset seems like a surprisingly great strategy — very efficient and cost and time conscious solution. Why bother, when all it needs is a little nudge, that’s all the more reason to make life so much more effortless!
Some might say, “this seems to simplistic, this shouldn’t fix such difficult, multi-layered tech issues!”. Perhaps. However, when one faces the constant issues of malfunctioning connections while going to important meetings or just on the daily commute — a reset like this suddenly seems not just easy, but also almost revolutionary in its efficiency!
Carplay’s Silent Struggle
One wonders what else, could make these simple little electronic connection, the digital bridges that transport music and maps so hard to navigate. Is this an error of over complex engineering, and over eager developers constantly adding something new to these systems to justify their salaries? What is broken?
Perhaps a more honest assessment can help the digital teams to look into the issue of connection quality, a matter often overshadowed the never-ending “improvements”, the feature-lists which need to become bigger and longer! Maybe by simply fixing these daily glitches we are so frequently struggling with could bring much greater pleasure, that would seem more valuable than yet-another-useless-feature? One needs to remember to think about real, actual usage in daily situations and be prepared to prioritize the very basic of basic tech features! In tech that should not be too much to ask.
After all, the story we have learned here goes like this: the power of digital systems is often undermined not through complexity or new technology. Often the root of the problem hides in those areas of daily, and also simple things, not thought of as “revolutionary” or sexy to develop in Silicon Valley, but important none-the-less to us “the normal users”! The smallest things can make our digital experiences much more fun and enjoyable when technology gets the basics right! And this does seem very important, considering the investment everyone is making with both the vehicles and the digital infrastructure around their cars.
And now I will leave you with the words from a certain Roman emperor turned philosopher: “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts” which might sound counter-intuitive but fits perfectly into our digital connected world!
Find more great things that fit to the use of Apple CarPlay at https://platformeconomies.com
