GoKawiiliOS 27 is officially here, available now in beta, and it brings a handful of improvements for CarPlay. Here’s everything new for CarPlay in iOS 27.
New Siri AI
Apple’s Siri overhaul is the tentpole addition to iOS 27, and the new ‘Siri AI’ capabilities on the iPhone are available in CarPlay too.
Siri has a new UI that’s more like the pre-iOS 18 design, but with less color. It appears as a glowing orb at the bottom-center of the screen.
Siri in CarPlay is now much better at answering questions of any kind, similar to ChatGPT and Google Gemini. In my testing, it’s also able to retain the context of your current conversation better than ever before.
In a nice touch, conversations you have in CarPlay are automatically synced to the Siri app on iPhone. You can browse the full Siri history in the app, and there’s a car icon marking conversations you had via CarPlay.
Video app support
Apple added video in the car with iOS 26, but it was limited to AirPlay streaming. But per a WWDC video, with iOS 27 developers can now make dedicated video apps for CarPlay, so that users can browse videos right on their CarPlay display.
From the video transcript, which is targeted toward developers:
With iOS 27 you can create apps to browse and play videos in new cars that support the video in car feature. If your app supports AirPlay video streaming, no changes are needed. People can already watch videos from your app on their CarPlay display when they aren’t driving. To do so, they simply select the car’s display when playing the video on iPhone. Now you can take it to the next level and let people browse their favorite videos from iPhone right on their CarPlay display.
... continue reading