Apple released its first beta of their iOS 10 update on Monday 13th June, which contains a much requested feature from CarPlay owners – to reorder and hide your apps on your CarPlay homescreen.
Having recently decided to install the first iteration of iOS 10 (which can never be a good idea), here I am with my How to guide, and later, my impressions of this new feature in iOS 10…
Due to the variety of CarPlay display and touch technology on the market today, Apple has chosen to manage the order and visibility of our CarPlay apps directly on our devices, via the Settings area. So let’s head over there…
1. Enter the Settings App
2. Enter General > CarPlay Settings
3. Select Your CarPlay Device
It is worth mentioning that the area to order and remove apps will not come alive until you have a CarPlay device connected and available to select in your General > CarPlay settings. Once you do have a device available, you will see the following option.
4. Enter Your Selected Device to edit your CarPlay home screen layout
Viewing each home screen is done by simply swiping between them in the panel at the top.
5. To hide an app
Removable apps will display with a minus icon on the top left corner of each app. As you can see from the image below, Apple requires you to keep Phone, Messages, and Now Playing, along with your vehicle’s manufacture App (in my case the Alpine app), on your home screen. If you wish to remove the Music, Maps and Podcast apps, you will need to remove these from your iPhone screen instead.
Select a removable app (marked with a minus icon) and drag it into the empty white area below, as seen below. You can tap them also to remove them. To add it back again, simply tap the icon again in the white ‘draw’ and it will snap back into an available space on screen.
6. Reordering Apps
Reordering apps on your CarPlay home screen is done in the same way you order them on your iPhone screen. Simply tap and drag the app icon around the window and into the position you desire. Tapping and holding the app icon on the edges will also allow you to place apps on additional sub-screens.
7. Live Updates
Hiding and reordering apps can be done, and the effect seen instantly, whilst your device is connected to your CarPlay system. Any hidden apps disappear instantly from your CarPlay screen, and reorganised apps immediately change their position once you’ve dragged them around on your connected iPhone screen.
Once you are happy, simply close the Settings app and continue using CarPlay with your new layout and hidden applications present on your CarPlay display.
Overview & Impressions
This feature that has been long overdue, but it is now finally here, and best of all, it just works!
I don’t use Apple Music, yet I do listen to Beats 1 now and again, so I would have preferred be to able hide the Music app from the CarPlay settings page, instead of actually removing the app from the iPhone screen (which will remove it from the CarPlay screen). If you do still want to have Apple Music present on your iPhone, you can at least kick the Music app into the second screen.
If this is how Apple decides to customise our CarPlay homescreens, I can see future customisation options becoming possible; such as background artwork, icon scaling, amount of apps displayed per screen and many more possibilities that we can dream of.
iOS 10 is available to developers now, and will be available as a public beta in July. The final release version will launch to everyone this fall, most likely alongside the release of the new iPhone 7.
