How iPhone Drivers Are Working Around What CarPlay Can’t Do

In theory, CarPlay eliminates the need to look at your iPhone while driving. Maps appear on the car’s display. Music controls are built in. Calls route through the stereo. The phone can stay in a pocket or a cupholder, untouched.

In practice, people keep mounting their phones on the dashboard. Not everyone, but enough that the aftermarket for magnetic mounts remains robust. The behavior persists even in cars with fully functional CarPlay.

The reason is that CarPlay only handles a subset of what people actually use their phones for while driving. Navigation is covered. But checking a text from someone not in your contacts isn’t. Seeing a notification from a delivery app isn’t. Glancing at a parking app, or a timer, or a note you left yourself—none of that surfaces in CarPlay.

So people compromise. They use CarPlay for the primary task—navigation, music—but they keep the phone visible for everything else. The phone becomes a secondary display, handling the margin cases that Apple’s in-car interface doesn’t address.

This creates a strange tension. CarPlay is designed to reduce distraction by consolidating controls. But by omitting certain functions, it forces people to manage two screens instead of one. The iPhone stays in view, just slightly out of sync with the car’s system.

There’s also the issue of older vehicles. CarPlay requires compatible hardware, and not everyone has it. For those drivers, the phone isn’t a supplement—it’s the only interface. The mount becomes essential, not optional.

What’s revealing is how many people with CarPlay still choose to mount their phones anyway. It suggests that Apple’s vision of in-car iPhone use doesn’t fully align with how people actually drive. CarPlay is elegant, but it’s not exhaustive. Previously listed at $18.99, some mounts now sit closer to $15.75, though the persistence of the product category matters more than the price—it’s a signal that the software hasn’t eliminated the need for the hardware.