2025’s Next-Gen CarPlay? Apple Has Shown Us They Can’t Deliver

Photo by Natalia Y. @foxfox on Unsplash

We’ve made it through 2024, and two and a half years after announcement the next-gen CarPlay is … still a proof of concept.

Apple promising the arrival of the first cars in 2024 turned out to be AirPower levels of vaporware.

It’s like when software engineers promise a Friday delivery, but neglect to tell you they mean next Friday.

The Developer Impact

For developers betting on Next-Gen CarPlay to revolutionize their apps, this delay is akin to waiting for code review on a PR posted Friday at 4:59 PM.

Apple has a habit of treating the developers dependent on their “ecosystem” with distain. Remember when they wanted to lock third-party developers out of the iPhone (yay webapps!) and only after a year did they decide to open the App store to open up the iPhone to developers. Yeah, that again.

They — don’t — care.

The Tech Industry’s Bigger Problem

Apple’s misstep isn’t isolated. 

It’s symptomatic of a tech culture obsessed with announcements over accountability and developer support. Grand unveilings? Yes. Actual delivery? Let’s push that to “future-you’s problem”, where the developers down the pipe have to wait for a memo to let them really know what is going down. 

This is the same short-term thinking that created tech debt, turned code reviews into bureaucratic trench warfare, and left junior devs relying on YouTube to figure out what “idiomatic Swift” actually means as Apple sure aren’t going to tell you.

Then there’s the copycat effect. Apple sets trends (which can sometimes be good) and smaller companies scramble to mimic them. Announce now, scramble later. Look at how Android Auto tried to keep up with CarPlay’s user base while major automakers ditched both, deciding their own mediocre solutions were worth the frustration of users rather than dealing with the tech behemoths. Developers see Google, Amazon and the rest treating them as an afterthought, following like lead of Apple.

But Why?

There’s an Occam’s Razor answer here: Apple never had the automaker buy-in they claimed to get this thing out of the door. Or maybe they did, but timelines slipped, technical challenges arose, and the once-solid partnerships evaporated. Think of it as the developer equivalent of planning a feature without consulting QA, DevOps, or anyone who actually uses the product.

Apple see themselves as “above” developers at other firms. Sherlocking is the term for when Apple introduces features or apps that directly compete with third-party apps, effectively rendering them less useful or obsolete — imagine we have a term for this screwing of developers. Their documentation is less than useful and the state of Xcode needs to be seen to be believed. Apple get away with treating third-party developers this way, and it needs to stop.

Where Do We Go from Here?

As of now, it seems Next-Gen CarPlay will join the pantheon of tech dreams deferred. A neat idea undermined by delays, over-promising, and a lack of commitment from key players. The losers? Developers who spent time building around promises, users who expected better, and Apple’s credibility in delivering on ambitious ideas.

It is a story with Apple that’s gone on for a long time and shows no sign of abating. Unless I guess all the developers jump to another platform, but where are we going to go? Google (lol).

Conclusion

So, the next time Tim Cook tells you to dream big, remember that Apple developer dreams, like Next-Gen CarPlay, often stay exactly that — dreams.