CarPlay’s Messages App for iOS 26 is Bad

I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

• It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
• Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.¹
• The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
• The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

I believe the Messages UI could more or less copy what the folks working on Phone have done. A place for favorites and recents, in two different views, could work nicely:

This was filed with Apple as Feedback FB18960216.