CarPlay is great, but a few customization tweaks make it even more convenient.
If your vehicle supports this feature, one of the best quality of life improvements you can make for your drives is to set up Apple CarPlay wired or wireless. This way, you don’t need to deal with the bulk of a phone holder. Your navigation app of choice and essential media controls are displayed directly on your car’s infotainment screen. Plus, with Siri getting a major overhaul in iOS 27, interacting with your device completely hands-free should finally be reliable while you drive.
CarPlay’s user interface uses a lot of bold text and large icons to make information easy to view and touch. It’s solid by default, but a few tweaks will put the most important elements in front of you and make everything easy to deal with.
By default, CarPlay uses dark mode so that your car’s infotainment screen doesn’t blind you in dark environments. If this makes readability more difficult during the day, you can switch to clear mode by going to Settings > Appearance in CarPlay using the touchscreen or your vehicle’s controls. Here, select Automatic for CarPlay to switch between light and dark modes depending on ambient lighting conditions.
The Settings app in CarPlay (Settings > Wallpaper) is also where you can change the background that appears behind all your apps. While you can’t use a custom image from your phone’s gallery, there are a handful of Apple-designed wallpapers with different color and pattern options to choose from.
Likewise, visit Settings > Customize Icons to choose a dark icon pack or switch to light icons that follow Apple’s Liquid Glass design philosophy. In the Accessibility submenu, you can change the text size to improve readability.
Rearrange apps and use widgets in CarPlay
Adnan Ahmed for Woozad
One of the best ways to customize the display in CarPlay is to rearrange the apps on the home screen. Unlike the above, this customization happens on your iPhone. Go to Settings > General > CarPlay and select your vehicle, then press Applications.
To bring your frequently used CarPlay apps to the first page, rearrange the list using the handles. Your car’s display size affects the number of apps that appear on each page, so keep that number in mind when adjusting the list. Press the Withdraw icon for all applications you don’t use; A few default ones can’t be deleted, so drag them down if you don’t care.
It took forever for the iPhone to support widgets on the home screen and even longer for Apple to bring widgets to CarPlay. Widgets were finally added to CarPlay with iOS 26; they live on a separate page accessible by swiping right from the main dashboard.
Depending on the width of your car’s infotainment screen, you’ll see one or more stacks of widgets at once. By default, CarPlay lists widgets that it thinks you might find useful, such as the clock, calendar, media player, and weather. To make better use of this space, you need to customize which widgets display in which stack. After all, you don’t want to frantically go through the entire stack while you’re on your way to finding the widget you’re looking for.
To do this, visit the same CarPlay your phone settings page as mentioned above. Faucet Widgets and make sure that Show widgets the toggle is activated. You can add widgets to each stack or rearrange them to keep the essentials easily accessible. What appears here depends on your installed apps.
