Apple Car play problems
 

Hi guys ive had my a4 for about 3 weeks now and i tried to use apple car play yesterday morning and the first time i connected my phone with my car everything worked fine. Once i started my car back up again it automatically connected to car play but then just after a couple of seconds the connection manager page appeared and i was unable to connect back to apple car play again.

Does anyone know how to get a consistent connection with apple car play?

Looking for a good reply, myself. My Car Play is inconsistent at best. Sometimes, it doesn't show music (Pandora) for a while, other times I'm unable to forward to the next channel. And sometimes it works perfectly fine.

I really liked it when it worked but i was very frustrated once i was unable to use it again.

I've been using CarPlay for about 4 months, but I don't have a magic bullet. It's just buggy and I end up disconnecting and reconnecting the phone regularly.

One thing that seems to help is to not plug in the phone until after the MMI has initialized. The pattern that I've settled on is to start the car, buckle the seatbelt and then connect the phone. It isn't 100% effective, but seems to help. Of course, it could be a placebo too.

I've tried Car Play a while back in an A4 loaner. That was with iOS 9. Even in that short time it was apparent that it is very buggy. Sounds like things haven't improved in iOS 10. I continue to be underwhelmed by Car Play. It's not something I'm looking forward to in my next car at all.

Carplay is far superior than anything else, though. And Audi isn't responsible for updating it. Yeah, it's buggy sometimes, but it's just so much better than anything out there.

Agree to disagree, I guess. Far superior is quite a stretch. It falls way short of its main competitor Android Auto. Google Maps is still far superior to Apple Maps and Android Auto is about to get Waze support (might already be released). Siri also doesn't offer its predictive features over Car Play like the Google Assistant does, and calendar integration is completely absent. I frankly think it falls short of the MMI itself. Even the MMI now has direct calendar integration so you can quickly start navigating to your next appointment w/o fumbling with your phone. Another lacking area is offline navigation support. The MMI has no problems navigating in areas with no cell coverage, a common occurrence on many of my road trips. Google Maps at least has some half baked offline support if you remember to download the rough area you going to ahead of time. The buggy nature of it all just makes the shortcomings even worse.

Hmm the times I've used android auto it's been difficult to connect, the screen wouldn't scale to fit the MMI the way carplay does and looks pixelated, and it locked the phone out from being used (yes safer but also there are things I need to glance at occasionally), and I think Apple maps is getting much much better than it used to, I also think that it was difficult to use. Not saying that carplay is the best thing to happen but I don't think it falls 'way short' I think they both come out the same with some pros and cons of each. I don't really navigate much though so that's not important to me (and only use wade for cop spotting which the car will still verbally tell me over carplay).

I will say that using carplay on my Q7 with newer software is much faster and more reliable than on my A4.

They are both buggy no doubt. To make Android Auto full screen you have to enter developer mode and change the screen size. Not sure why this option is not available outside of developer mode. It could be Audi's implementation that's buggy, who knows. I think it comes down to what you use it for. For me Navigation is kinda the key feature and as a years long iPhone user, Apple Maps is till not my primary choice. It has certainly improved. It more often finds what I'm looking for if I do a search on my iPhone, then it did before, so I'm using it more frequently to look up places and then share them with the MMI connect app, so I can navigate to them using the MMI, but for actual navigation, I still choose Google Maps when I'm not driving my own car. It's just much better in terms of keeping me updated on the fastest route etc.

Remember this is a departure, particularly for Apple. Apple is used to having full control of hardware, so there's definitely some weird stuff in interfacing with Audi's MMI system. Yeah, it's buggy, but the good news is, if the bugs are on Apple's side, they will be addressed quickly.

If you have a non-Pixel android device, you're in a bit of trouble because you may never see the upgrade and even if you do it certainly won't be timely.