The other day, I went out to start my car and clear away the snow. I sat down in the driver’s seat, put the key in the ignition, started the car and music started blasting away.
I was not pleased.
Of course I have a phone with bluetooth that is paired with my car stereo, but I didn’t expect it to choose a random audio file and just start playing.
The confounding thing is that this just started happening one day, without rhyme or reason.
So I experimented.
I made it a point to shut off the audio system before leaving the car, but that didn’t work.
Next I started switching from bluetooth audio to FM then turning off the stereo. The beast just turned itself back on and started playing a random track from my phone.
I tried everything I could think of.
I searched the settings on the radio. I combed through the settings on my phone. I even turned off the bluetooth on my phone, but it turned itself back on when I started the car.
Finally, I found a setting on my phone called carplay.
Carplay has a number of features, but one of them is to automatically connect your phone to the stereo.
Note that you can still connect your phone to your car via bluetooth without using carplay.
I deactivated carplay and the problem stopped.
HOW TO SOLVE/SOLUTION (ALTERNATE SOLUTIONS):
Here’s how to disable Carplay:
On your iphone find the settings app.
-
- Launch settings.
-
- Go to Screen time
-
- Go to Content & Privacy restrictions
-
- Allowed apps
- Turn off carplay.
Why does this work?
Carplay looks to be a very useful app. It allows you access a lot of the features of your phone from your cars media console. You can use it to play music and podcasts as well as use your phone’s gps system.
However, not every car supports carplay. For example, Toyota’s entune media system has just announced that they will be starting to support carplay in some of the 2019 models. Prior to 2019, it isn’t supported.
Because it isn’t supported, it glitches and just starts playing music in any vehicle you have paired with.
The reason the glitch showed up suddenly is that my phone had just updated and apparently the carplay app was activated during the update.
