iPhone 17 owners report wired Apple CarPlay glitches on iOS 26: pixelation, crashes, and disconnects. Apple hints at a known bug; a stability fix soon.
© A. Krivonosov
Reports of a new headache for iPhone 17 owners surfaced this week. According to piunikaweb, users are flooding threads with complaints about wired Apple CarPlay acting up. The main symptoms are screen pixelation, system crashes, and frequent disconnects, turning routine drives into a test of patience.
Messages come from drivers across different car brands, and discussions on Apple’s official forums and Reddit suggest the issue is widespread and still unresolved. Users say that when they connect to CarPlay, the display can turn blurry or heavily pixelated, especially during navigation. Others note abrupt music drop-offs and crashes just a few minutes into a session.
Curiously, previous-generation devices—iPhone 15 and iPhone 16—updated to iOS 26 do not show the same behavior. That points more to a compatibility snag between the iPhone 17’s hardware and the current iOS build than to a blanket software bug.
Many have tried to fix the problem on their own—swapping cables, including official ones, and resetting both the phone and the in-car system—but none of these steps seem to help.
Apple has yet to offer a clear public explanation. Some users report that support staff attributed the glitches to car manufacturers, while others say Apple representatives acknowledged a known iPhone 17 on iOS 26 bug and indicated it would be addressed in upcoming updates.
For now, it’s a waiting game. Given the volume of complaints, a CarPlay stability patch feels likely sooner rather than later.