Carplay is coming....
A little teaser for everyone who has been chasing me for carplay support. It is coming! I am making progress!
It's a real pain in the ass development experience though, it's very restrictive and there are very few good examples around to refer to for what you can and can't do and how to do it. Also working with react-native adds an extra layer of complication that you need to think about but I have made good progress. In development I can launch substreamer from the head unit, browse and play music without ever touching the phone which is actually pretty cool the first time you do it.
The thing that makes this so time consuming is really the ability to test. You can ONLY test on the ios simulator with it's built in carplay function which has known issues with playback state and a few other things so you spend so much time chasing your tail trying to fix things only to eventually stumble across a reddit post or a github issue on some other random repo confirming it's a simulator issue. It would make the development experience so much easier if you could just go buy a car headunit with carplay and android auto and sit it on your desk and test against it (which was my plan before realising it wouldn't work).
My application is in with Apple for the substreamer carplay entitlement and once they grant that I will be able to test again real headunits which will make things move along faster.
Don't worry I haven't forgotten android auto either, it is also implemented in parity with carplay with all the same functionality. That's been it's own magical journey...
