New "iOS in the car" screenshots revealed by developer

Car stuff, iPhone
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Apple is slowly working on bringing the iPhone experience to the car dashboard – and some screenshots of what it might look like have surfaced on Twitter, thanks to developer Steven Stroughton-Smith.

“iOS in the car”, as it is being called has been in development for some time – though until now information has been somewhat limited. The idea is that when you get into your car, your iPhone will hook up to your in-car display – enabling you to access phone-powered GPS and other apps and services.

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Above is what looks like a home screen – with only the Apple Maps app available on it. As you might expect, things are being kept simple so that drivers can keep their eyes on the road – so the only other stuff is the time, a wifi indicator to confirm there’s a connection and a virtual “home” button.

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Here’s Apple Maps running in car mode – again, with slightly stripped back controls and operating in landscape mode. The buttons appear to be a bit chunkier than on normal iPhone apps, because when driving its easier to mash your fingers on to roughly the right place than be precise.

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Be careful! Here’s a friendly reminder that what Apple Maps tells you to do maybe inaccurate. I think this is the closest we’re going to get to an official apology for Apple Maps being beyond terrible.

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And finally, here’s another maps screenshot showing how you can access bookmarked locations.

So it is clearly early days for iOS in the Car – but here’s hoping Apple making it just as open as the main iOS platform – not least so we can get Google Maps, but also also because it will be interesting to see how developers take to building in-car functionality.

As you might expect, there’s no details on release dates yet.

James O’Malley
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