A car’s infotainment only has to be built with CarPlay support once, but does not need firmware updates every time a new functionality is added to CarPlay. CarPlay updates are available on your iOS device, and your car’s radio will be able to receive those updates from your phone without any changes to the car itself!

Great music discovery is effortless and free with Pandora. Just start with the name of one of your favorite artists, songs, genres or composers and Pandora will do the rest. But the only problem is – even though most car manufacturers are all licensing CarPlay in their latest models, many older models do not have CarPlay support. There are better Pioneer head units out there, but if you are mainly interested in CarPlay, then this unit has way more than what you need, that too at such a low price point. The screen size is a bit smaller than that of other popular head units, because of the left side of the screen having a panel of touch-sensitive buttons with functions like “Home”, volume control, and switching between modes. So yes, even though we have been ranting about the system’s CarPlay support, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it also has Android support.The AppRadio interface isn’t bad, but of course it seems cluttered compared to Apple’s clean interfaces. Out of the box it is clear that Pioneer has chosen to mimic the look of Apple’s iOS devices. With its silver edge rimmed bezel design, the AppRadio 4 carries a close resemblance to an Apple iPad. The glass-fronted display houses a 6.2-inch capacitive touch-screen, with a resolution of 800×480 – similar to both the Alpine and JBL headunits, and most other headunits selling in 2016 come to think of it. Connect the phone using a CD-MU200 Mirrorlink cable, connected to USB port 2 (bottom) on the rear of the unit. My instant reaction, when turning on the Pioneer, was that the screen felt lower in quality. The pixels on CarPlay icons looked more pixelated than on the Alpine, even though both displays share the same resolution of 800×480, and the Alpine’s display is bigger.

Ensure the device is set to 'iPhone' and connection is set to 'USB', ensure that 'CarPlay' is turned on You mainly want to be able to perform voice-controlled commands with Siri, like making/receiving calls, composing/listening to text messages, playing music from your phone, and searching for places on Maps.

There are a limited number of apps available on CarPlay presently: Phone, Messages, Maps, Music, and Podcasts. Among third-party apps there is support for Spotify, Rdio, and Stitcher (if these are installed and active on your iPhone, they will show up on CarPlay too). Whether you connect your phone via a USB connector or not, this head unit does have some basic Bluetooth support for actions like hands-free calling, wireless song search and audio streaming, and audio control. This is built-in to ensure driver safety in accordance with local driving laws. Works with your iPod I will not report on CarPlay itself on the Pioneer because, what is written today can change or could be improved upon next month with software updates, so be sure to read our other articles for opinions on Apple CarPlay OS, its app updates and changes to Apple’s CarPlay platform with each new iOS update.