You Can Now Use Google Maps With Apple’s CarPlay In iOS 12

Over the years, Apple CarPlay has been a must-have car tech feature for iPhone users. But for those without inbuilt sat nav in their car’s infotainment system, it’s also been somewhat frustrating, as it has only supported the proprietary Apple Maps nav.

No longer. After confirming it will now allow third-party navigation apps within Apple CarPlay at its World Wide Developer Conference in June. As of September 17th at 6pm when the iOS 12 went live, now the firm has confirmed the software update that will provide iPhones with the functionality to do this has, gone live and is available for installation.

Now publicly available in the iOS App Store, version 5.0 of Google Maps features the company’s own map data and material design language. It also enables users to get Google-optimised directions and locate points of interest not found on Apple’s maps, including locations synchronised from Google account data, such as home, work, and contact addresses.

For the time being, Google Maps on CarPlay notably omits Siri-powered voice control. You can, however, access Google’s own voice search functionality. In a feature that might tempt some Apple Maps users, Google Maps continues to include support for downloading free maps of a given area, enabling you to have map access even when you’re not online.

CarPlay support is the only marquee new feature in version 5.0 of Google Maps, and arrives after a post-WWDC beta testing period that hopefully eliminated any navigation-related bugs. Google’s Waze app, which integrates user-submitted traffic reports into maps, is currently in beta for CarPlay and expected to be released in the near future.