CarPlay Wireless Dongle

[psybernoid]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good wireless Carplay dongle?


I've ordered and subsequently returned quite a few from Amazon. Including Carlinkit, Ottocast and more generic models. They all appear to use broadly the same hardware/firmware.

I have an iPhone Pro Max 17. 75% of the time, it'll connect up just fine. the other 25% of the time, it'll connect with a black screen. The GPS is terrible. Slow to update and often freezes. When using indicators at low speed when the camera kicks in, a previously working connection will most often come back to a black screen when the camera display closes and goes back to the Carplay view.

Music often skips when streaming (is fine when playing from downloaded onto the device)

With every dongle I've tried, I've tweaked multiple settings - from adjusting the wireless channels, setting audio/GPS/startup modes to type 1, 2, 3 etc. Nothing seems to solve it.

Car went in for service and software update yesterday. I was hoping that might resolve it. But nope.

When using the iPhone directly connected via USB cable, these problems don't exist.

 

[ReintjeWA]

Dongles need a delayed start up, but that won’t fix all the issues you’ve described.

Songs only paying smoothly when downloaded would indicate an issue with your phone’s connection/speed though, not necessarily the dongle. Same suspicion could be had with regards to bad gps signals.

I had a Quadlock dongle, which dropped out a lot after a while. Switched to Carlinkit 5.0 mini which has worked flawless until this morning. I am very suspicious of iOS 26 though, lots of things seem to have gone backwards with that update.

 

[psybernoid]

Dongles need a delayed start up, but that won’t fix all the issues you’ve described.

Songs only paying smoothly when downloaded would indicate an issue with your phone’s connection/speed though, not necessarily the dongle. Same suspicion could be had with regards to bad gps signals.

I had a Quadlock dongle, which dropped out a lot after a while. Switched to Carlinkit 5.0 mini which has worked flawless until this morning. I am very suspicious of iOS 26 though, lots of things seem to have gone backwards with that update.

Indeed so. It's probably either iOS 26 and/or connectivity.

As I say, I've gone over pretty much every conceivable combination of startup delays, wifi channels etc. In fact, one of the carlinkit ones I tried - the 5.0 2air got its knickers in a twist when I selected one of the higher 5GHz channels (I forget which one) it just stopped broadcasting. And as there was no way to factory reset the thing, that too got returned.

 

[Cabansail]

As I said elsewhere, a Smart Dongle came with the car from the original owner. It works OK most of the time. I did get an Ottocast Play2Video Ultra 2.0 and it had more features but lagged a LOT. I did some research and found a fix for that issue. It was to configure the phone to connect using 5GHz instead of 2.4GHz. Apparently the difference is amazing and the lag almost disappears. The problem is that I have just upgraded from an iPhone 8 to the iPhone 11 and it does not have the ability to used 5Ghz in that mode.
Hence I have gone back to the Smart Dongle. It will be a few years before I upgrade my phone again. That will be when this model cannot update. I am really not interested in the camera functions as I have proper equipment to take photo's and any old phone will do what I need from such a small sensor.

 

[mgpete]

I have been using one of these small low cost units from Aliexpress. It seems very reliable and is so cheap it's worth a try.

2026 Pionray 2-in-1 kabelloser CarPlay-Adapter und Android Auto Wireless-Adapter, 5 GHz WiFi Typ-C/USB Plug Play CarPlay Wireless - AliExpress 34

Smarter Shopping, Better Living! Aliexpress.com

www.aliexpress.com