"Boring" is good compared to most of the systems the car manufacturers came up with. A some of them still manage to screw up the integration of CarPlay with their own infotainment systems which often don't seem to want to get out of the way.

You are right, maybe because it’s boring it is good, but IMO its not fantastic. Main use case is using google maps in a pretty inconvenient way…

Like, you iOS doesn’t support my language maybe then just let me read message on that massive screen.

And if my kids want to watch peppa pig - let them? Blocking video from central console is such immature safety feature.

The display of outside temperature is a curious oversight. That's the one thing I find myself regularly toggling back to the native console for.

iOS plasters that information all over the place when running on the device itself, so it is not like it is out of character.

CarPlay does not work well at all on my 2018 Golf. There's a multitude of obvious, awful bugs. (eg. audio directions not occurring, but nonetheless ducking spotify audio for them)

> audio directions not occurring, but nonetheless ducking spotify audio for them

FYI - there are two different audio “sources” at play: “music” and “announcements”. Your “announcements” volume is set to 0.

Not that I have any idea how to change that on your car, but on my VWAG car I can adjust the “announcements” volume by turning the volume dial while it is speaking the directions (or not, in your case)

How much of that is the fault of shitty CarPlay hardware in most cars? We see how well things like AirPlay works when Apple controls both ends of the hardware.

Probably about 90%? Apple is writing software in an attempt to replace native software and whenever their software doesn't perform as well as the native software performs it's on them.

I do understand that Apple needs to integrate with hardware from hundreds of different manufacturers and I feel their pain - but nobody is twisting their arm and forcing them into the market.

I'm sure 10% of the time or so the car maker is just being completely incompetent in using incompatible hardware or switching things out at the last minute without warning - but yea, mostly on Apple.