Apple play

[Daveh129]

Hi, I’ve just bought a 2014 GTi, it arrives on Friday... does anyone know if it will support apple play?

[JoeGTI]

No.

[Little Lofty]

You're not missing much, a recent thread came to the conclusion that it's a bit rubbish.

[Booth11]

No, no MIB1 units can support it.  Only MIB2 units (MY16 onwards cars - built from 22nd May 2015) have the possibility of having App-connect retroactived, and even some of those can’t, they have to have a voice button rather than a mute button.

Contrary to the recent thread rubbishing it, I find CarPlay very useful, sure it has limitations but I use it exclusively now and rarely use my pro nav in built systems. It’s not for everyone but it’s far from rubbish.

[WD-40]

I don't think it's been rubbished per se, it is after all much better than not having it (i.e. the standard VW set up), I use it every day. And it's also better than the (non-carplay) systems I've had with recent cars from Audi/Merc.

All the ingredients are there, it's just frustratingly limited, either by Apple protectionism (i.e. no Waze/Google Maps, competitor music apps being buggy) or VW implementation (i.e. not brilliantly integrated with the rest instrument display etc).

[fredgroves]

The thing that annoys me is that anyone with half a brain at VW should have seen the shortcomings of their implementation at an early stage of development and made some changes.

Its quite clearly a very obvious attempt at programmed obsoleteness, to make "next year's model" better.

Probably more frustrating still is that car manufacturers don't provide software upgrades during the life of a system. In pretty much no other case do you find a software item these days that doesn't offer feature upgrades during its lifetime.

For example there was no reason why MIB1 units couldn't have been software upgraded to use ACP/AA and no reason why later upgrades couldn't have integrated ACP/AA to the AID.

I suppose its only to be expected from an industry where it took them 15 years to add a CD player to a car.

[JoeGTI]

I'm a big Apple fan boy (not sure I'd admit that publicly  ) and I really wanted to like CarPlay - I even paid to have it retro-activated on my R. But as per my post in the other thread on this subject, I found it frustratingly limited, very buggy and poorly integrated with the native VW setup. Best thing about it? It "looked nice" on the radio screen 

I'm now in a different car and the standard infotainment system is light years ahead of VW (a proper built in Spotify App, an actual usable Nav system). I don't have CarPlay but it can be activated for a couple of hundred. I'm unlikely to bother tbh, as I know it is inferior to the existing native setup in the car.

[Booth11]

Shouldn’t be the case, but car industry (esp VW) is always years behind with this kind of tech, always has been, so if your expectations are in line with that, you find you are less disappointed.