Photo: Bogdan Popa/Car Evolution
Waze is significantly better than Apple Maps for several reasons. First, the crowdsourcing engine allows users to send traffic reports and help the application find faster routes to the destination. Apple Maps also offers incident reporting, but the feature has yet to gain ground, even in the United States.
Second, Waze has a larger user base, as it also works on Android and Android Auto. This significantly increases the number of notifications, while Apple Maps only receives notifications from iPhone owners.
However, using Waze on CarPlay has become a major neck pain and is often dangerous due to a bug that causes the app to stick to the light visual style even at night.
Users reported the outage in early August after receiving a new Waze update. The latest Waze version on iOS devices is 4.97 and was greenlit in the App Store on August 2. This one is most likely responsible for the bug, as the previous update dates back to July 13.
Waze users who turn to Google’s forums claim that the application ignores the “Only at night” setting and sticks to the light mode even when driving in total darkness. Dark Mode can only be activated by opening the app on the iPhone, so users will need to unlock their smartphones and launch Waze to disable Day Mode on CarPlay.
It was initially believed that only the wireless CarPlay was affected by the bug, but it now appears that the wired sibling is also suffering from the same problem. The solution is the same in both cases: users need to open the application on the iPhone to enable dark mode while driving in the dark. However, users say that this solution fixes dark mode only the first time Waze is launched on iPhone. If the app is already running on the smartphone, CarPlay will remain in light mode unless the user force closes and restarts Waze on the iPhone.
Using Waze with day mode while driving at night is dangerous as the screen is too bright.
The Google-owned company has yet to acknowledge the outage, but given the behavior has become widespread, a patch could be included in the next Waze update. A new version should be rolling out in the coming days, as Waze typically releases a new update every month.
In the meantime, users should stick to the manual workaround outlined above, as going back to a previous Waze version is not allowed on iPhones unless users restore a full phone backup from iTunes.