Is this the "successor" to react-native-carplay?

[bitcrumb]

Hi there, quick question!

Am I correct that this library is being used by Iternio (creators/maintainers of ABRP) as a successor to react-native-carplay?

I noticed @g4rb4g3 once made a fork of react-native-carplay, which seems rather unmaintained by the author.

Is the react-native-auto-play a result of the learnings of this and can I "expect" react-native-auto-play to keep being maintained in the near future as it probably is being used inside ABRP as well?

The reason I am asking is that I need CarPlay/Android Auto support in an upcoming project as well. I already looked into this in the past (and remember it being somewhat of a hastle) and want to make sure to pick the right library :)

Thanks for the huge effort already and the involvement in the React Native CarPlay/Android Auto scene!

[bitcrumb]

Also -as it stands- I seem to be able conclude that this library is only to be used in the bare workflow (and not the managed workflow) due to the requirement of having to use Scenes. So no expo-dev-client and EAS for now until React Native and/or Expo add support for Scenes (and probably improve a ton of other things as well)?

[g4rb4g3]

Hi @bitcrumb
Exactly, we did this library to use it inside of ABRP.
For quite a while we have used react-native-carplay which has a few limitations and quirks we wanted to get rid of.
Mainly the lack of new architecture support and the different APIs for Android Auto and CarPlay.

This new library has new architecture support (which isn't new anymore 😂) and a single streamlined API for both Android Auto and CarPlay.

We'll definitely maintain this as long as we use it in our app but we mainly focus on navigation app needs.
You can see this by the lack of several templates right now like contact or music templates.

We'll add stuff we need ourselves for obvious reasons but we are also happy about contributions adding features and improvements.

Your conclusions are right, this works only with bare Expo projects because of the missing scene support on react-native.
EAS is still working fine, so you can use the Expo infrastructure for building and deployment.

My fork of react-native-carplay will be archived soon once we release ABRP with the new library to the public (right now Beta builds are out already).

[bitcrumb]

Thanks for your quick response! This sounds very promising, thank you :)

I would mainly need CarPlay integration for playlists & now playing (since it would be coupled to a music app). So thanks for pointing out that still being a "missing link"!

I'll do some reading up on Android Auto, CarPlay (and scenes) and this library. Who knows what comes next 😄

THANK YOU!

[g4rb4g3]

Sounds great, maybe you wanna team up with https://github.com/anultravioletaurora on that topic? She mentioned adding Android Auto and CarPlay on Jellify Music and starred this repo already. 😊

[g4rb4g3]

In case the whole CarPlay window is black on the simulator it might be an iOS 26 issue, we faced that too already. Try an iOS 18 simulator or a real phone and the CarPlay simulator app (separate xcode addition download from Apple).

[bitcrumb]

Ah yes, I am indeed running against iOS 26. Was already in the process of reinstalling Xcode and all simulators 😅 Thanks for the tip!

I did download the CarPlay Simulator app already, is it only to be used with real devices?

Thanks for being this responsive, appreciated! :)

[g4rb4g3]

Yes it works only with real devices. It's way more reliable and also supports cluster screens which aren't available on the iOS simulator.

[bitcrumb]

Just FYI: after removing all simulators and all Xcode versions (I still had a 16.4 version installed as well) and reinstalling only the latest Xcode 26.2... CarPlay seems to function on both iOS 26.2 and iOS 18.6 in the simulator 🥳

[g4rb4g3]

Xcode 26 is a hard requirement, we use some APIs that were added recently that are unavailable on xcode 16.