The upcoming iOS 18.4 release for iPhone has a small, but useful, change for Apple CarPlay. However, you will need a car with a larger display and CarPlay support to try it out.

The first beta release for iOS 18.4 arrived on February 21st, 2025, and one of its improvements is that Apple CarPlay can now have three rows of icons on the home screen. CarPlay was previously limited to two rows of apps, which meant more scrolling if you had many CarPlay-compatible apps installed on your phone.

Unfortunately, this change only seems to be enabled on cars with larger screens, at least for now. It was spotted by JKidwell86 on the MacRumors Forums, who owns a Toyota Tundra. They didn’t specify the year and make of the Tundra, but the latest models can be equipped with up to 14-inch screens. MacRumors tested it with a Honda Civic with a 9-inch screen and didn’t see the three rows of icons, and another person with a 10.25-inch screen in their 2022 Kia Sorento SX also is not seeing the extra row.

Google has been working on updates for Android Auto that take better advantage of the larger screens in some cars, allowing the current app to stretch to fill different sizes and change the layout as needed. This is a step in a similar direction for Apple, though we still do not know the exact criteria for the larger home screen.

It is worth noting that Apple showed off a “next generation of CarPlay” back in 2022, which covers the entire dashboard and instrument cluster with enhanced navigation, better widgets, and more music controls. Even though that teaser is still on Apple’s website, there are no cars using the expanded interface. This new change is a slight usability improvement for cars with larger screens, but it is not anywhere near the ‘next generation’ interface that Apple promised a while ago. The company was teasing a 2024 timeline for the first cars with next-generation CarPlay, but that promise was quietly removed back in January, according to MacRumors.

The iOS 18.4 beta release also includes access to the ‘Apple News+ Food’ subscription with tens of thousands of recipes, a dedicated Vision Pro app for better integration with Apple’s augmented reality headset, and a few other minor changes. As always, you probably should not try beta operating system updates on your main devices, as there are probably some unsolved bugs and broken features. You would not want to be stuck somewhere with a dead phone because of a battery-draining bug that Apple has not got around to fixing yet.

The iOS 18.4 update will likely be released to everyone within the next few weeks. The new iPhone 16e is expected to ship with iOS 18.3, with a day-one update available to iOS 18.3.1 with some bug fixes.

Source: MacRumors, MacRumors Forums (1, 2)