Taking a call from the road has been a thing since the dawn of the car phone, but tech companies are still finding new and innovative ways to make escaping meetings impossible. While CarPlay and Android Auto have traditional phone calls baked into their functionality and support certain other calling apps, Google Meet has never been supported. If you have a work call you need to join while in the car, you either need to go through the potentially cumbersome steps of disconnecting your phone from the car and playing the call through the phone itself, or, if it’s an option, have someone else take the wheel while you dial in.
That’s now changing—at least for those of us with iPhones. On Thursday, Google announced that Google Meet is now available on CarPlay. Of course, that integration now means you can take work calls while driving (audio only, of course), but Google Meet’s CarPlay has some additional functionality as well. According to Google, you’ll be able to view your upcoming schedule in the app and join meetings by tapping on them. That’s obviously useful when trying to join specific meetings, but, like many CarPlay experiences, I wonder if there’s a bit too much going on for an app that’s designed to be used while driving.
This is convenient, but I don’t want to get into an accident because someone was reviewing their afternoon schedule.
Credit: Google
Nevertheless, Google Meet is now available to drivers, though Google is adamant that no video capabilities are present here. While your iPhone is connected to CarPlay, your camera will be disabled during Google Meet calls, and you won’t be able to see any of the other callers’ video feeds. The company says this feature is available for all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with Google Accounts for personal use.
The most notable omission from this list of users includes those on Android. This is just another curious case of Google rolling out functionality in the iPhone version of its app before the OS it actually develops in-house. You would expect Android users to get this feature at the same time as iOS, if not earlier, but Google must have a reason. Maybe there are more Google Meet users on iOS than there are on Android, but whatever the reason, Android users will need to wait a bit longer to call into work meetings through Android Auto.
What do you think so far?
Google Meet is the second big CarPlay announcement this week. OpenAI also announced ChatGPT support for CarPlay on Thursday, following changes to iOS 26.4 that open up support for AI chat apps. When I gave it a test drive, ChatGPT immediately hallucinated.
