Enlarge / Porsche is the first automaker to expose car functions like climate and lighting via Apple’s automaker toolkit for CarPlay. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The introduction of Apple CarPlay in 2016 was a game-changer. Until then, connecting your phone to your car meant bothering with Bluetooth, and if you wanted to use a smartphone navigation app, you probably needed some kind of phone holder clipped to an air vent or suction-cupped to the dashboard. Being able to cast your phone’s screen to the car’s infotainment system turned out to be extremely popular, and by 2020, it was a feature that almost half of all new car buyers wanted.

This has not sat well with every automaker; in March of this year, General Motors made headlines—and generated a lot of comments—when it announced it was killing off support for casting interfaces (both CarPlay and Android Auto) from its future products. But where GM saw a threat, Porsche saw an opportunity. And now it has built a new iOS app, making use of an Automaker toolkit provided by Apple. This little-known feature is only offered to OEMs and allows them freedom beyond the restrictive user interface guidelines laid down by Apple.

Porsche’s customer research found that the overwhelming majority of its customers have iPhones and prefer using them for things like navigation. “Obviously, you have to switch back and forth to control some features around media, for example, some more specific features around climate,” explained Cyril Dorsaz, principal product manager at Porsche Digital. “And ultimately, we learned through customer research that this is something that our customers are not really happy with.”