We’ve covered the new CarPlay experience in iOS 26 a lot over the summer. There’s a lot of excitement for a lot of the changes, but it turns out not everyone loves the complete experience.
On 512 Pixels, Stephen Hackett details four issues he has with the new Messages experience in CarPlay with iOS 26. One of his complaints is about name truncation. That’s something I find deeply relatable as I basically have an allergy to unnecessary truncation. The Settings app on my Mac will often truncate “Siri and Apple Intelligence” while using my display at the default resolution. It’s a bug that pains me each time it occurs. Anyway, Stephen’s other complaints are about design and layout decisions.
It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
[…]The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.
If I’m not mistaken, the Messages app only allows for up to nine pinned conversations. If that’s correct, the 5×2 grid will always have a blank slot, at least in Stephen’s truck.
Opting for just five pinned conversations would even out the layout in CarPlay, but the 3×3 grid on every other device would consist of three icons in the top row and two in the bottom row. You’ll notice that the 5×1 approach is what Apple takes in its marketing images for the new Messages app on CarPlay in iOS 26.
That’s the challenge of designing a single interface that scales across all sorts of displays and in different contexts.
If you look at the screenshot in his post, you can see the unread badge complaint logic too. Personally, I could go the rest of my life without ever seeing an unread notification badge again, but Apple doesn’t have a universal off switch yet.
CarPlay in iOS 26 is also the most adaptive version yet. A new Smart Display Zoom feature allows the user interface to shrink enough that more content can be shown on the display. This is also a situation where, well, your mileage may vary depending on various factors.
What do you think? Is the new Messages app a step in the right direction that a few adjustments could fix, or is CarPlay going in the wrong direction for your preferences? Let us know in the comments.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Source link
