CarPlay vs. Android Auto
CarPlay strives to make you feel at home with its familiar grid of app icons on its home screen. Everything is laid out differently and works differently than on your phone, yet it still manages to look and feel familiar. The changes are all designed to make it safer to use while driving. Apple has done a remarkable job of changing nearly everything while ensuring that everyone who owns an iPhone will know exactly how to use it from day one.
CarPlay's home screen only displays apps that are specifically designed to work with CarPlay. Most of the apps are built-in Apple apps. The first batch of third-party apps are streaming audio services like Spotify and CBS Radio News. Apple is tightly controlling who can develop apps for CarPlay, but has promised to open it up to more developers soon. Apple and Google have both put in place rules about what apps can't do, to keep you from getting too distracted while driving.
The way Apple has designed CarPlay, the door is left open for more creative apps beyond just streaming audio, such as apps that tell you what's ahead (traffic, road conditions, weather, food, gas, etc.) or something like a location-based audio trivia app. Perhaps the Automatic app could even show you nerdy details about what's going on under the hood, right on your dash. Apple doesn't seem to allow these types of apps quite yet, but they have promised to expand the APIs in the future, and it's obvious how that might work. That's a potential advantage over Android Auto, which has no app menu and offers no way for apps to take over the screen.
The core apps of CarPlay are Phone, Music, Maps, and Messages. Each of these rely heavily on Siri for interactive voice control, and you can also access Siri directly by holding the virtual home button on the screen, or the voice button on your steering wheel (if your car has one.) So launching an app like Phone or Messages from the on-screen icon will trigger Siri to ask you who you want to call or message. Or you can trigger Siri yourself and say something like "New message to Eric". Siri can of course also take you to an address, find the nearest coffee shop, or play a specific song.
The interface is intentionally very limited to keep you from being too distracted while driving. You can't summon a keyboard to type a message or enter an address. You can't even display a message to read on the screen. These functions - and anything else that would take your eyes off the road for more than a half-second - must be done by voice, for safety's sake.
The CarPlay interface has a typically classy Apple style to it, making it many times more attractive than the typical Windows-95-esque graphics most car makers seem to design. But while CarPlay's graphics look modern and dignified, they're also relatively generic and boring. On the plus side, the graphics are very easy to read at a glance, again, for safety's sake. They have a timeless quality that blends in with any dash design. But it's also the least sexy interface Apple has put out in a decade, so it's hard not to feel a little let down. And it doesn't compare favorably against Android Auto's sexy Material Design interface.
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