At WWDC, Apple unveiled iOS 26 with significant updates to CarPlay, including Live Activities and widgets. These features provide drivers with glanceable, timely information without needing to open apps or handle their phones.
This approach echoes the experience Android Auto offered when it launched in 2014. Originally, Android Auto focused on simplicity with quick access to navigation, phone, and music controls, along with a Google Now-powered homescreen showing minimized directions, weather, calendar, and emails. The goal was to offer proactive and distraction-free information.
However, Android Auto shifted in 2019 toward an app-centered design that increasingly resembles CarPlay’s current interface, losing much of its original proactive simplicity.
Many critics lament Google’s pattern of discarding innovative features only to later mimic Apple’s designs in platforms like Android Auto and Wear OS. With iOS 26, Apple appears to be modernizing concepts Android Auto pioneered a decade ago.
Live Activities and widgets on CarPlay reflect this revival of timely, glanceable information. Although Android Auto still includes some proactive elements, such as address suggestions from calendar events in Maps, these are rare.
Looking ahead, Google may reintroduce more proactive features, possibly enhanced by AI developments like Gemini. Widgets could also become a valuable addition to Android Auto, though they might require a different implementation.
For now, observers note that Google’s quick pivot to imitate Apple came at the cost of its own early advantages in automotive interfaces.