GM Brings CarPlay Back to Its Trucks, and This Time It Shares the Screen

Three years ago GM decided it was done with phone projection. Today it announced the opposite. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are coming back to its cars, though they no longer get the whole screen.

The new interface debuts on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500, with other GM models to follow. CarPlay and Android Auto now run in a window alongside GM's own software, so the map, the trailering readouts and the truck's settings stay visible while your phone's apps do their thing next to them.

What GM was actually mad about

The 2023 decision was easy to read as GM wanting its own app store, and some of that is surely true. But GM's stated complaint was narrower. Plug in your phone and CarPlay swallows the entire display, including the parts of the car you might want to reach. So GM built its own Google-powered system instead and started shipping EVs with no phone projection at all.

A window-in-window layout answers that complaint without asking anyone to give up their phone. Colin McCormick, GM's product manager for in-vehicle phone projection, put it plainly: "The thought here is that these should coexist and you should get the best of both worlds." Which is a sentence GM could have said in 2023 and saved everybody the trouble.

Sixty-three inches of glass

Splitting a screen only works if the screen is big enough to split, and these trucks are not short on glass. A 16.3-inch center touchscreen and a 12.2-inch instrument cluster are standard. Higher trims add an 11.5-inch passenger display, a 15-inch head-up display and an 8.5-inch rear camera mirror, which comes to about 63.5 inches of display in a single cab.

The passenger screen is polarized so the driver can't read it, and it runs Disney+, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Music and a web browser, with sound going to Bluetooth headphones or the cabin speakers. The driver can lock it from the center console. I expect that button to see most of its use as a parenting tool.

Apple and Google are in the room

GM says it worked with both companies on this, and that the work is ongoing. "We're constantly working with Google and Apple on what else we can bring to make this even better," McCormick said. The two sides aren't even yet. Android Auto goes deeper, because GM's native system is Android underneath, while CarPlay isn't fully wired into the truck's own dialing experience.

The EV question GM won't answer

GM's electric cars were the first to lose CarPlay, which makes them the real test of how far this reversal goes. GM's press release says the new interface is built as a single scalable foundation across electric, gas and diesel-powered vehicles, which sounds like a yes. Asked directly by Electrek, GM said it had "no other product plans to share," which is not a yes. The two trucks confirmed so far are the gas ones.

If you drive a GM EV, nothing changed today. The foundation apparently exists. Turning phone projection on for the electric cars is a separate decision, and GM has not made it in public.

Who this is for

Truck buyers, mostly, and specifically the ones who asked a Chevy salesperson whether it had CarPlay and then walked back out to the parking lot. That customer turned out to be real enough that GM spent three years building an alternative and then built a way to let CarPlay in beside it.

The 2027 Silverado and Sierra are the only vehicles confirmed so far. For anything else GM sells, including every EV in the lineup, you're waiting on an announcement that hasn't happened yet.