Just some feedback after living with the phone for a few days after installing IOS 13.
CarPlay is much better, but it's still not perfect - it's definitely not in the "it just works" category, which one expects from Apple systems.
I find that if my phone has poor connectivity to the internet (I think that is the cause), when I connect the phone to my car, then I have lots of hassles. In those cases CarPlay simply will not activate or start. Or the CarPlay connection is established, but then immediately freezes - in the worst case, it completely crashed my car infotainment system to the point that I had to switch the car off, to get it to reset.
I never had that problem before - plugging the cable in always resulted in CarPlay activating and connecting to the head unit. Now with the new IOS, that has become iffy, most of the time it works. But in some cases I can struggle all the way to the office, trying to convince the damn thing to connect.
But once it connects and gets itself sorted, then it's much more stable than before. So it is an overall improvement, but it's still quite poor from the point of view of being something you can just rely upon to work every time.
I think Apple made some pretty stupid design decisions when they designed CarPlay. I suspect they assumed that an Internet connection would always be available and would work flawlessly, so that they could establish all sorts of cloud connections, and if those connections are not available, or drop, then the whole thing becomes unstable. It seems that they have relaxed the requirement for the internet to always be available, but now need to make a lot more connections (or something like that) when CarPlay first becomes active, as you plug the phone into the car? Something like that?
But whatever it is, those assumptions do not map to what happens in the real world. So we have a product that sort of works, and when it does is quite neat, but also drives one to drink in its unreliable behaviour!
