We have so many different ways we can customise the Home Screen of our iPhone. But if only there was a way we could do the same to CarPlay. Well, actually, we can. And there are quite a few different things that we can change. In this short video, I’ll show you how to change the wallpaper, the dark mode, and the icon style to make CarPlay feel like it’s yours.

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Okay, so in CarPlay, we’re currently in kind of the default mode. There’s a nice light, colourful screen here. We’ve got the Maps on. This is kind of how CarPlay works when you haven’t changed anything.

If I jump into Settings, however, we’ve got some different options here. And the first one I like to do is go onto Appearance. Here we can choose Light Mode or Dark Mode, just like on iPhone and iPad. Now, for me, when I’m driving, the dashboard tends to be very dark, so I like having Dark Mode on CarPlay, I feel like it blends in a little bit better. And if I turn Dark Mode on, we can then go straight back to our home screen, and we can see the difference.

You may notice, however, that the Maps on that home screen are still really bright. And there’s a dark mode of Maps, where it’s more black and blue rather than kind of yellowy-green. So, back in that Appearance settings page, we’re going to go to the Maps option just underneath Light and Dark Mode, and we’re going to turn on Always Show Dark Maps. And now, when I go back to my CarPlay home screen, I’ve got that nice dark interface, and the Maps match.

Obviously, customise this to your liking, but I’m going to keep it like this for now, and then we’re going to try and make it even darker. So the next thing to change is our wallpaper. So we’re going back to Settings, and this time we’re going to tap onto Wallpaper. Every time iOS gets updated, there are new wallpapers for CarPlay, and these are the iOS 27 wallpapers.

I can tap onto one of these, and I can have a nice preview in full screen. And whilst this kind of red-orange looks beautiful, it isn’t the kind of dark vibe that I’m looking for, for my CarPlay setup. So instead, at the bottom, there are a set of basic colours, and there’s a navy and there’s a nice black colour as well. I’m going to go for the black one. And now on my CarPlay display, the whole screen kind of blends into the whole centre console unit, I can’t see the edge of the screen anymore because it’s all black, and it does feel a bit bigger, which I think is quite nice.

So now I’ve got Dark Mode set up and a dark wallpaper. The last thing to do is change our icons, and we’ve got a few different options here, so let me talk you through how this works. I’m going back to the Settings page for the last time, I promise, and this time we’re going to go onto Customise Icons.

Now, there are three different options at the bottom, and it shows you a preview in real time right above there. Well, Light Mode is self-explanatory, that’s the default. But if I go onto Dark Mode, I can choose Auto Dark or Always Dark. Auto Dark bases it on the time of day, so when the sun starts setting, it will go darker. But I like having it on Always Dark. You can see those nice dark black icons on the dark black screen, and it looks really smart, it really fits nicely into my car.

But actually, we can go one step further, and we can almost make CarPlay black and white by using the Clear icons. These were fairly new in iOS 26, and Clear basically means there’s no colour there, but you can see the background through the icon. Well, depending on the wallpaper you’ve chosen, you’ll get a different effect here. But for my black wallpaper, I think this looks really, really smart. I could then choose Clear Dark.

And now when I go back to the home screen, look at that, my car looks completely different. This isn’t going to change the colour in other areas, so the Music app will still have colour, the Maps will still be in dark mode, in fact, everything that you do on your CarPlay screen will have colour. But it does make that home screen and the dashboard look really smart, and it blends nicely into my car.

I hope that helped you customise your CarPlay. Make sure you check out this video next.