5 Free CarPlay Apps You Should Be Using (According To Users)

If you have a car that supports CarPlay and you haven't been using it, you've been missing out. CarPlay effectively transforms your iPhone into your infotainment system, replacing the car manufacturer's system. While driving, you get better maps, better management of calls and notifications, and overall smoother performance. CarPlay supports multiple iPhones, and you can use Siri to control things and have messages read aloud so your eyes remain on the road. Apple CarPlay is completely free and likely works with your car. We've previously covered 15 essential Apple CarPlay apps you should download, but finding apps that support CarPlay out of the box isn't always an easy task — and not all of them are free.

In that spirit, we're looking at five free CarPlay apps you ought to be using. We've selected apps that fit your morning commute, help on long road trips, and everything in between. Download the following and you'll really upgrade your CarPlay experience.

You can check the weather at your destination easily enough with one of the best weather apps for iPhone, but we'd wager the app you use won't be able to tell you what it's like every step of the way during a long drive. That's the sales pitch of Weather on the Way: a detailed forecast — especially of extreme conditions — that you might encounter on a road trip. This is America, after all, and it's not all that crazy to say you might drive from a hot, sunny state down south to a frozen one up north that requires winter or all-season tires. Weather on the Way helps with that, fully supports CarPlay, and is free to use.

You can use Weather on the Way in one of two ways. Either plug in your destination and eyeball the forecasts for your planned route, or use it as a navigation app that provides real-time updates on the weather — great, if you're unsure what to expect. If the route you plan to take is beset by extreme weather conditions, this could help you plan a better, safer alternative that might not be backed up with heavy traffic. You can use this app to plan your trip a couple of days ahead of time, too, instead of finding out the weather has taken a turn for the worse on the day of.

The basic functionality of Weather on the Way is ad-free and private. The pro plan adds early trip planning, radar for big rain and snowstorms, road surface conditions, and extra data like visibility and wind speed. Compared to a lot of apps, the pro version is priced decently: $4.99 per month, $19.99 per year, or $84.99 for life.

Dash cams aren't just an endless source of insane and hilarious videos, they're also basically a necessity in this day and age. Dash cam footage could very well be the difference between an expensive day in court and the judge laughing a deceptive lawsuit right out of the courtroom. The market for dash cams is competitive, with plenty of options for the best models that record 24/7. But there's a cheaper alternative: using your iPhone instead. The Driver: Driving & Dash Cam App transforms your mounted iPhone into a dash cam.

The benefits are twofold: You save money on a dash cam, and you get the superior camera quality of the iPhone. A common issue with dash cams is their poor image quality and visibility, which makes pulling a license plate number difficult. The free version of Driver records your drives, simple as that. The continuous recording allows bookmarking segments when something happens, so you always have peace of mind knowing you have footage of anything that could present an issue. Since it supports CarPlay, Driver can make use of your infotainment screen as a dash cam display.

Of course, all the best features are locked behind the pro version, but in this case, you're getting a lot more than just camera customization and cloud uploads. Driver Premium also keeps you safe using AI to detect a potential crash — like, say, when someone ahead of you is braking hard — and offers roadside assistance if you do get in a crash. Premium is quite pricey, though, at $11.99 a month or $95 a year. We'd say this is a great use for an old iPhone that you keep plugged in full-time as a dash cam.

Map apps are quick and to the point, getting you from A to B with no frills. If you're tired of that humdrum state of affairs, then MapQuest may just be the app for you. It supports everything you would expect a map app to support: turn-by-turn navigation, traffic updates, alternate routes, a speedometer, the works. And of course, it works with CarPlay. However, where MapQuest distinguishes itself is in its UI.

When MapQuest says MapQuest, it really means a quest — as in, sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, that sort of thing. The app gamifies your route with little cutesy, 8-bit pixelated characters. In short, it takes a normally utilitarian affair (navigation) and packages it into a more entertaining UI so every route feels kinda sorta like an adventure. So those dreary morning commutes that don't bring you any joy might be a bit more bearable with MapQuest. That's really all there is to it.

Perhaps the best part about MapQuest is that it really is free. The app is supported by ads, meaning all of the functionality is available to all users. To remove the ads, you only have to pay $1.99 a month — cheap, as far as subscriptions go these days. Ad-supported apps that let all users have the same functionality are few and far between, so this app is an easy recommendation for that reason alone. Just one caveat: This app only supports routes in the U.S. and Canada.

Audible is probably the first app you think of when you think of audiobooks, and it does support CarPlay. But Audible isn't free. You either need to pay the Premium Plus subscription price or buy individual audiobook versions. Users may also have additional reservations that aren't financial in nature; this is, to be clear, the same Amazon responsible for the big change to Kindle books that effectively killed ownership of digital books purchased by users. Whatever your reasons for disliking Audible, there's a better free alternative also supported by CarPlay: Libby.

Libby is amazing because it's free and 100% legal. You can digitally check out books from your local public library and read them on your phone or download Libby Books to your Kindle device, as if they were physical copies that you have a week or two to read. Libby works a lot like the Kindle app, allowing offline downloads, saving your spot in the cloud so you can pick up where you left off on another device, and more. And yes, Libby includes support for audiobooks. CarPlay is supported, too, so you can pass the time on your commute or a road trip with a free audiobook rented from your local library — and listen to it at 3x speed if the narrator is putting you to sleep.

Libby doesn't just allow you to download free books from your library, it's itself 100% free to use. There are no ads, no subscriptions at all. Let this be a demonstration of how powerful your library card really is compared to paid options. Instead of paying for Netflix, you can save money by streaming free movies from your library with Kanopy.

Apple Podcasts is hands down one of the best podcast apps for Apple CarPlay, and a great podcast app in any situation. That said, it's an Apple app, and that naturally entails being a bit behind when it comes to features. Enter Overcast. You'll find most of what you need from a podcast app here, plus a whole gamut of subtle, intuitive settings that you might not find in others. Smart Speed, for example, lets you listen to a podcast without the voices sounding like chipmunks on helium, while Smart Resume rewinds a little bit after you've paused a podcast, in case you don't remember what they were talking about.

It's not always leading the charge when it comes to features; Apple Podcasts has things like full podcast transcripts, for example. Still, Overcast is one of the best third-party options out there, and of course, CarPlay is fully supported. The solo developer behind the app pushes out updates and new pro features on a regular basis.

Where Overcast really distinguishes itself is in its dedication to privacy and its pricing model. The app only collects limited diagnostic and usage data that's not linked to you. Importantly, it does so without using privacy-infringing third-party analytics companies. The free version only shows ads for other podcasts at the bottom of the screen, which aren't intrusive or sourced from privacy-infringing companies. Overcast Premium is an incredibly affordable $14.99 per year, which removes ads and gives you access to some extra pro features. When apps of this sort can easily cost $10 a month, we have to applaud Overcast for raising the bar. The app offers an incredibly robust free version that doesn't annoy you by constantly pushing you to upgrade to pro.

The apps on this list were carefully curated to avoid aping the typical top apps seen across the web in recommendation lists. We focused on apps that offer an actually usable free experience. Sadly, it's all too common for apps to claim to be free, only to spring a paywall bait-and-switch once you download them. The apps on this list do not require you to pay to make meaningful use of them or enjoy basic functionality. In addition, we prioritized apps that provide the best of their functionality for free; MapQuest and Overcast lock only a handful of nice-to-haves behind a paywall, with the meat and potatoes being free. Libby is 100% free to use. Weather on the Way and Driver still let you do the main thing they're designed for, for free.

Aside from this, we avoided apps that had few reviews. All of these apps have a 4-star or better average, with thousands of ratings apiece. Every app on this list is a must-have for its user base. And of course, the most important requirement of all: Every app on this list works with CarPlay.