I built Otto because iOS 26 opened the CarPlay dashboard to third-party widgets and then almost nothing good showed up there. The interesting part turned out to be the constraints. CarPlay never draws a widget's containerBackground, so a widget that hands its background to that layer renders bare — no card, no edge, just glyphs floating on the car's wallpaper. Four of my five widgets did exactly that. They now paint their own surface as content, because the car can't strip what isn't in the container. I also built a goodbye sound for when you leave the car. It works — out of the phone in your pocket, because audio routes back to the phone the instant CarPlay disconnects. That one can't be fixed, so it was deleted; the disconnect now saves your parking spot instead and raises a Live Activity with the way back. One more thing worth saying out loud: widget buttons do fire on the car's touchscreen. Only launching the app is dead, and the system dims that tap in a way that reads as "nothing here is interactive". It isn't — a Button(intent:) inside the widget runs. The parking button was tested on a real head unit. Otto is free; Pro is one payment, not a subscription. Every competitor in this niche charges weekly, and their one-star reviews are all about exactly that. Happy to answer anything about CarPlay's limits — I wrote up what the car taught us here: https://kburakengin.github.io/ot...

Otto

CarPlay dashboard widgets — one payment, no subscription

CarPlay dashboard widgets — one payment, no subscription