CarPlay disconnecting

I did a hard re-boot ios 12.1.4, iPhone 7, Honda Ridgeline 2017 that had previously hundreds of disconnects; since the hard reboot of the phone I have had zero disconnects, going on 4 days now. fingers crossed....

Funny you mentioned it getting worse. Yesterday, CarPlay just dropped and I tried disconnecting-reconnecting ~10 times with no luck. Then I ran an errand for 30 mins, returned to the car, plugged it in and, voila, it worked. All previous instances of CarPlay dropping were resolved within a minute or so, though the number of disconnect-reconnect attempts varied between one to five.

I also experienced CarPlay dropping in the middle of a call. For ~10 seconds I could barely hear the caller on my phone (regular sound, not iPhone speaker mode) and the caller could hear me (unclear if via iPhone mic or receiver's external mic). Then my receiver magically switched to using Bluetooth and the call resumed to broadcasting on the car speakers and using the receiver's external mic.

All of my equipment (hardware) is new: receiver 2 wks, Apple cable 2 wks, iPhone X 1 month. This matters, IMO, because it likely eliminates poor physical connections as the root cause of the problem, by which I'm referring to worn USB port on receiver, worn Lightning-USB cable endpoints or dirty/worn Lightning cable port on iPhone.

Further isolating the problem to (possibly) iOS is that my receiver is a new model, but it uses the same "guts" as older models that have been around for several years. The primary difference between models is the built-in internal amp wattage. The receiver is running the latest firmware version.

To recap:

• CarPlay randomly drops
• "Fixing" it requires disconnecting-reconnecting Lightning cable, and even that sometimes doesn't work
• New iPhone X running iOS 13.1.3 (Lightning cable port isn't dirty or worn)
• New Apple Lightning-USB cable (endpoints aren't worn)
• New receiver (USB ports aren't worn, firmware up-to-date, system "guts" based on well-tested platform)
• The large number of complaints, coming from a wide variety of CarPlay-supported receivers, and frequent reports that CarPlay issues increased after iOS updates, strongly suggests the root cause is iOS stability/reliability.

Same problem here. Problem just started happening in the last couple of months with a recent IOS update.

It had been working fine for almost two years in our VW, but started dropping the connection around mid-November. Same issue in our brand new Honda.

Two different cars, two different iPhones, both phones having the same disconnect issue in both cars and started happening around the same time.

My guess is the issue was introduced in iOS 13.2.2 or 13.2.3. Still seeing the issue with iOS 13.3.

Only solution is to disconnect the cable and reconnect.

I have exactly the same issue (brand new X5 iPhone x) - I did speak to connected drive who recommended updating the apps (go to home screen then aps and then press options and there is an update apps option - I was surprised as I thought the master updating also covered app but apparently not).  This did seem to make it better (but not perfect) and I had it booked it with main dealer who looked at it and said there is a fix coming in march (apparently) and I will have to take it back in (its not one that can be done over the air apparently). Picked the car up after they had had a look and its worse than ever :-( . Am putting all my hope in the fix. It does seem to be a BMW / connected drive issue - I've tried other phones and I've noticed that Apple Play just disappears off the media menu so its not iPhone issue.

will try resetting but its hardly a fix.

I have tried numerous things. Is your icloud library turned on under the Apple Music settings. Mine was I turned it off and CarPlay was stable for awhile but is disconnecting again.

I had same issue in my 2018 Subaru Outback. Since upgrading my iPhone to 11.4.1 it no longer disconnects.

I‘ve no experience of wireless connection, but, if possible, why not try connecting for a time with a cable? If no problems via cable then that might narrow down the problem somewhat.

Updated to iOS 12 last night and didn’t have any issues on my drive to work this morning. I’ll continue to monitor during lunch and on my commute home. Fingers crossed.

Try resetting network settings

Never mind I found it... it’s never been on 😔

You should be able to tell it to forget the car or vice versa

The USB option is switched to OFF by default. The phone connects fine and Works for a time then is disconnected once the phone auto locks. Changing this setting may resolve the problem for people if the setting disallows access once the phone auto locks after a time.

Hi All --

I wanted to provide an update to my situation. I recently bought a 2018 F-150 Raptor with Ford Sync 3. I also have the 2019 Mini Countryman S Hybrid in my previous post. Both have Carplay. The Carplay in my Mini is wireless only, in the Raptor its wired only.

I also purchased an iphone X in addition to the 6s that I have. My testing on this is not exhaustive, but is fairly extensive at this point.

Anyway -- previously I had noticed that when the cellular (LTE/4G) signal gets very weak is when the wireless carplay signal dropped in the Mini. I know some places I drive on a regular basis where I can replicate this and it does indeed replicate. I tried to replicate this with the Raptor. It also replicated. So, I think there is an issue with the cellular signal strength and carplay disconnecting -- at least in my opinion.

With the update to iOS update to 12.01, this issue is less common, but I am not convinced it is totally fixed. I have been in Japan for a couple of weeks and am just now back to continue my testing -- I will report more as I get more data points.

Additionally, I would like to point out a new issue I am having in BOTH the Mini and the Raptor that seems to have shown up with the 12.01 update -- more than half the time, music playing on the phone (amazon music, google play music, pandora, XM radio app, and others) will come through both the Raptor and the Mini's sound system as a voice call, rather than music. This is even more annoying than the dropping of the signal! Both cars (wired and wireless) route the voice to only the center console speaker, so now I have these fancy (and expensive) sound systems but play audio from a single speaker more than half of the time. The other part of this that is annoying is that when the music is streaming over the phone audio subsystem to the car rather than the stereo audio (A2DP?) the Mini changes its dash interface to let me know I have "external dialogue" going on and inhibits me from seeing all the car computer information.

This stuff is just killing me. Carplay is nothing more than inconsistent junk. It is so buggy at this point that I really don't know where to begin to troubleshoot. I will keep rebooting the phone and try other ideas for now, but I am not sure this product is ready for prime-time yet...

Just to add to this story, I am having the problem with random frequent disconnects also. I have duplicated the problem with 3 different iPhone models (6S, 7, and 8) in 2 different vehicles (Subaru Outback 2018, Subaru Impreza 2019) with multiple different Apple-brand lightning cables. I have factory reset the audio/navigation head in the cars. I have factory wiped and reset one of the iPhones (the iPhone 8). All iPhones running iOS 12.1.2. Disconnects occur regardless of what apps are active on the iPhone or in CarPlay. Sometimes CarPlay crashes with no apps active.

My symptoms seem unlikely to be a hardware problem in the phone (3 different phones) or cars (2 different cars).

Incidentally, I bought an Android phone just to see if it worked with Android Auto and Google Maps. It works fine.

When in flight mode it never disconnects, so how can it be the cable ?

Since last update it has now stopped disconnecting and I’m using the same cable.

So it’ not hardware or cable related.

Be interested to see what the results are if other drivers test in flight mode and just use iTunes.