Our app, Universalis (Apple ID 284942719) plays audio successfully on all versions of iOS up to and including iOS 17. It uses the old MediaPlayer interface because it is targeted at versions all the way down to iOS 12.
On iOS 18, it plays audio but CarPlay fails to show the Now Playing screen. Instead, a message box pops up in CarPlay saying "There was a problem loading this content", with an OK button. Nevertheless the audio plays correctly.
This has been reported in the wild by a user of iOS 18 with CarPlay. I am also able to reproduce it locally, running the app in Xcode with the CarPlay Simulator, with an iPhone using iOS 18.0 or iOS 18.1. Earlier versions work correctly.
Looking at the console log in CarPlay, the following error message appears about 10 seconds before the error message pops up:
MSVEntitlementUtilities - Process Universalis PID[1173] - Group: (null) - Entitlement: com.apple.mediaremote.external-artwork-validation - Entitled: NO - Error: (null)
The message has an orange background which appears to mean that it does not come directly from NSLog in the app. The message appears immediately after the request handler of MPMediaItemArtwork has been called requesting a 128 x 128 image and has successfully returned a 128x128 UIImage object.
This has been reported through Feedback Assistant: Bug report ID is FB15343941
How can we work round this error?
Thanks, we're tracking this internally.
In the meantime, please consider migrating your app to CarPlay templates. You can include both MediaPlayer's playable content and CarPlay templates in the same app; templates will be used for all users on iOS 14 and later, while playable content will work for users on iOS 13 and earlier.
For more details, see Supporting Previous Versions of iOS in the CarPlay documentation.
