How the Apple HomeView might finally bring some video streaming apps to CarPlay
Apple announced the HomeView smart display at its Welcome Home event on October 13, but hasn’t made itself particularly clear about support for video apps.
First of all, the screen is square so it’s not optimised for video in the first place. Secondly there’s no App Store to download third-party apps. As I pointed out in an opinion piece yesterday, this bummed me out because it would have been great to have good support for streaming apps.
We do know that Apple TV is one of the pre-loaded apps, and we do know that there’l be support for some apps that are available via CarPlay and from a paired iPhone. Any CarPlay supporting apps the user has on their iPhone will automatically be available.
At WWDC, Apple announced that CarPlay Video apps are coming natively with iOS 27, which negates the need to AirPlay videos from your phone to supporting in-car displays. But right now none of the major apps have adopted it and most of the existing apps are just mirrors for YouTube.
That may change now developers know that building support for CarPlay gets them in on Apple’s HomeView. An updated developer support document from Apple today has text reading:
CarPlay audio and video apps also work on Apple HomeView without requiring you to make any modifications to your app. […]
Apps with CarPlay audio app (CarPlay framework) or CarPlay video app entitlements appear on Apple HomeView.
So we might actually see the likes of Netflix and Disney+ build-in CarPlay support just to get on HomePlay? Seems a bit back asswards but that might be the case! The side benefit? You get to watch Netflix while waiting to pick someone up!
