iPhone 6 Plus Car Play no longer works
I believe I've nailed down a bug. And I can only confirm it with Apple iPhone 6 Plus.
Issue: If you Reset your iPhone 6 Plus, your device will no longer work with Apple Car Play (more specifically the Alpine ilx-007).
Brief: I bought the Alpine ILX-007 to use with my iPhone 6. At first it worked alright, but every 15 to 20 minutes or so it would disconnect, it would drop calls, or just not work. Unplugging it and plugging it back into the USB sometimes fixed the issue, but it was always a temporary fix. Consulting with the stereo manufacturer, they advised that I reset my iPhone. Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. Doing so wiped everything and returned me to a "stock" iphone. When I plugged in the iPhone this time, I got an instant pop up (paraphrasing) "This USB device is not supported". I went from being able to connect to Car Play but not having it work properly, to not being able to connect at all, whatsoever. At the shop we plugged in two other iPhones, a 5 and another 6 plus and both of them worked with car play.
Full story below;
I went home and did a restore to a previous backup (to no avail), and then I did another reset, but neither fixed the issue. From then on, I could only get the "USB device not supported" message whenever I plugged in that phone.
I returned the phone to the Apple store. They swapped my phone on the spot and I got a new iPhone 6 plus (thanks!). I downloaded two songs to test out the head unit when I returned to my car and car play worked 100% just fine.
I returned home to restore my phone and data from a backup and iTunes went from 8 minutes to restore, to 40 minutes, to 8 hours. It hung at 8 hours and didn't budge. I only had 500 songs to sync. I removed my phone from the computer and restarted it. Nothing out of the ordinary it worked fine. But because it was restoring and got hung, I decided to wipe it back to stock via Reset, just to be sure there wasn't going to be any issues. After resetting the phone, I plugged it back into the computer, synced all of my songs back to the phone no problem. Excited, I ran back to my car and plugged it in... "This USB device is not supported".
Looking back, the only thing that happened both times was the phone was Reset. I thought about the incomplete restore possibly causing an issue, but everything other than car play works fine AND when I did the original reset, there was no restoration involved. All I did was reset the phone.
I believe a driver, or some file or something that is necessary for Car Play does not get restored when you Reset your phone. Everything other than Car Play seems to be working just fine.
I could go back to the apple store, say its not working again and possibly get another swap, but I don't wish to waste more phones, nor do I want to have to hope that I never need to reset or wipe my phone in order to enjoy music in my car. So as of right now, I have an iPhone 6 that works well (outside of car play) and a brand new $800 head unit that only lets me listen to the radio 😝
Please look into this, I really wanted car play to work and enjoy my phone and car synchronization but at this point I'm frustrated and disappointed to be honest. I'm posting this bug to help keep other customers from ending up in this same situation, and hopefully you all can find and fix the problem.
Thanks for your time, hope to hear back.
-Larry Charles
iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 8.3
