How to Add Waze to Your CarPlay Home Screen

Waze is a community-driven GPS and navigational app. It does a great job helping you avoid traffic jams, as well as find the cheapest places to buy gas. It’s straightforward to install and add new apps to CarPlay.

How to Use Waze in CarPlay

Waze involves minimal setup to get started. Here’s what you need to know to use Waze.

What Can I Do With Waze? 

Waze works like other navigational apps, but it has some useful extra features included. Here’s an overview of its basic features.

Speed Tracking

When looking at the map screen, the left side highlights the speed at which you’re traveling. It also tells you the speed limit of the road you’re on.

Search for Cheap Gas

Want to find the nearest gas station? Most navigational apps provide that as standard. Waze goes one step further by allowing you to view the local gas stations nearby, along with current gas prices at the station. Prices are updated regularly by other Waze users.

Detailed Journey Times

Besides telling you how long your journey will take, Waze suggests better times of day within the hour to travel. It plots the average traffic during that time of day to determine the best time.

Report Tools

You can report accidents, hazards, or heavy traffic to forewarn other users about issues along their route. Reporting this information keeps the app up to date with what’s going on while traveling.

What Can’t Waze Do?

Waze is a useful navigation app. Still, it has some issues that Apple Maps doesn’t have. Here’s a quick look at its limitations.

You can’t set it as your default navigation app: Because of Apple limitations, you can’t set Waze as the default navigation app in your car. If you ask Siri for directions, it opens Apple Maps automatically. Limited POI details: Waze is a little rudimentary with its map details unless you zoom in extensively. So, it isn’t as good as Apple Maps for at-a-glance browsing.