Apple CarPlay gets widgets, a new design, and live activities

Apple says CarPlay is used more than 600 million times per day, and today at its big Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, the company had some news to share about it.

The new Liquid Glass design of iOS 26 will extend into your car via CarPlay with a "consistent, expressive experience while you drive". The new icons, Apple boasts, look great in both light and dark mode.

When you get a call, there's now a more compact design for the notification that still lets you see your map, for example. There are also tapbacks, letting you quickly respond to a message with an emoji by tapping on the screen, and pinned conversations in Messages, which you can get to faster.

With iOS 26, you're also getting widgets and live activities in CarPlay, and they're the same ones already on iOS, so app developers don't need to change them in any way in order to have them show up in CarPlay - they just automagically will.

Live activities will keep you informed of what's important to you in a corner of the UI, "all done in a way to help you stay focused on the road", according to Apple.

All of these updates are also coming to CarPlay Ultra, which was announced last month with Aston Martin. Ultra lets you control some features of your car in the CarPlay UI.

Many more car brands across the world are said to be working on CarPlay Ultra, so we should see more of it in the future.