Editorial policy and methodology

Where do the facts come from?

• Apple's own pages. What CarPlay and iOS do comes from Apple's iPhone User Guide, its Shortcuts User Guide and its developer documentation. Each guide links the Apple pages it used and gives the day they were read.
• Public US App Store listings. For the widget apps we compare, the name, the developer, the rating count and average, the version, the minimum iOS version, the advertised features and the in-app purchase prices are read from each app's US listing.
• Our own app. Facts about Car Play Widgets: Dashboard come from its App Store listing and from the app itself, version 1.5.

We say what the source says, in plain words. Where a source is silent, the page says it is silent. We do not turn silence into a claim.

What do we not test?

• We did not install or test the other apps. What a comparison says about them is what their listings say. Where a listing does not say something, the table reads "The listing does not say."
• We do not test in individual cars. Apple says the number of widget stacks depends on the vehicle's CarPlay screen, so we cannot confirm what a given car shows. Your vehicle maker is the authority.
• Steps in Apple's settings follow the Apple page linked beside them. Steps inside our own app follow version 1.5 of the app.

How are apps chosen and ordered?

The Best CarPlay Widget Apps for iPhone (2026) page covers dedicated car widget apps found in the first 30 US App Store results for "carplay widgets" or "car widgets" that have at least 100 US ratings. Our own app has fewer ratings. It is included because we make it, and the page says so.

• The order is US rating count, highest first. We do not rank our own app first.
• Ratings are numbers in a table, with the day they were read. There are no stars, no scores of our own and no rating markup in the page code.
• We do not call our own app the best.

How do the dates work?

• Published is the day a page first went up.
• Updated is the day its content last changed. We change it only when the content changes. We do not re-date a page to make it look fresh.
• A date beside a number is the day that number was read from its source. App Store numbers move, so read the date with the number.
• The same dates are in each page's structured data and in the sitemap. Changes are listed in the changelog.

What do we disclose?

• N5 Labs publishes this site and makes Car Play Widgets: Dashboard. Every page that mentions the app says so.
• A page that describes the app also says what it costs and what it cannot do: browsing and customizing are free, saving a widget requires Pro, it has no CarPlay app of its own and it reads no vehicle data.
• The site shows no ads and has no affiliate links. No one pays to be listed. Links to our own App Store listing carry a campaign token so we can count installs that start here.
• The site is not affiliated with Apple Inc. Nothing on it is official Apple information.

What will you not find here?

• Invented numbers, user counts, reviews, testimonials or awards.
• A generated picture presented as a photo or as a screenshot. A picture of the app is a real capture of the app, and its caption says so.
• Features the live App Store version of our app does not have.
• A claim about another app that is not on its public listing.

Pictures captioned Illustration are made with an image generator. They do not show a real car or a real CarPlay screen. In some, the image generator copied widgets from captures of our app. A real CarPlay screen shows widgets differently, and we have not yet looked at ours on one.

How do I report a mistake?

Email support@n5labs.io with the page and the line. If you make one of the apps we compare and your listing has changed, tell us and we will read it again. A confirmed fix is listed in the changelog. Who we are is on the About page.