With Google Maps and Waze appearing on Apple CarPlay soon after iOS 12 launched the end of last year, TomTom fans were left on the side bench waiting for its own Apple CarPlay update.
TomTom announced its Apple CarPlay update was coming in early 2019, and little else has been said from them since, which has lead to frustration from its many fans.
Fresh news has appeared during CES 2019 this week. TomTom has given attendees a sneak peak of the application running on Apple CarPlay in its CES booth. The demo has been shared on Twitter by a member of the TomTom team (below), showing the app running on a Sony aftermarket receiver whilst a wired iPhone sits next to it runs the same demo.
The Apple CarPlay demo shows a brief glimpse of TomTom’s navigation mode running, featuring lane guidance and speed displayed over its map tiles. With some critical UI missing from the display and no car (arrow) position displayed on the road, as well as what looks like the road running out at the end of the demo, it remains to be seen how complete this demo is and when exactly fans will see the update release on the App Store.
Some progress is better than no progress. There is also some hope good news in that TomTom has opened sign-ups to its Apple CarPlay beta program. But like the demo, the sign-up process is also having its own state of problems, with no feedback on whether the form has been sent along with all the fields resetting once sent.
[Update: TomTom has let us know that the form does indeed work. They are working on a confirmation fix]
We have reached out to TomTom for access to the Beta and we hope to bring you our impressions on the state of TomTom for Apple CarPlay as soon we hear more.
