Waze might be a super-popular navigation app on mobile devices and in the car, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is working exactly as expected all the time.

And the living proof is a new super-annoying bug that’s happening on CarPlay these days and which makes it impossible for drivers to adjust the volume of the music that’s playing in their cars.
More specifically, the issue, which first appeared earlier this year, got fixed, and now returned to haunt CarPlay users once again, breaks down the audio controls (both the steering wheel buttons and the ones on the head unit) in a way that only allows users to adjust the level of the navigation volume.
In other words, if you want to increase or decrease the volume of the music that you’re listening to behind the wheel, using the dedicated controls in this regard only adjusts the navigation guidance volume.
And the worst thing is that Waze doesn’t even have to be running to trigger this odd behavior, as it’s enough for the app to be installed on your iPhone to cause the whole thing in your car.
While Waze hasn’t yet acknowledged the problem, so we still don’t know when a patch is supposed to land, the easiest workaround is to just remove the app completely until an update is released.
But if you want to stick with Waze and still be able to control the music volume, you just need to always configure a destination in the app. In other words, whenever Waze is running, just make sure that it’s set to provide instructions to your destination, as having the app on the screen with no address configured seems to be the thing that’s triggering the bug.
This is without a doubt an odd behavior, but the good news is that the Waze experience on CarPlay is set to be substantially refined rather sooner than later. The Google-owned company has already announced a September 15 event during which several significant improvements are likely to be officially revealed.

The most recent version of Waze for iPhone and CarPlay doesn’t bring support for the navigation card on the dashboard, but it does come with something totally unexpected: a bug breaking down the volume control for many.

Users complain that after installing the latest Waze update, they can no longer adjust the volume in their cars, as using the volume controls only seems to change the level of the voice prompts in Waze.
“After the new Waze update I’m not able to change the main volume, for some reason when I press volume it only change the voice prompt. I find this really frustrating since Waze was my go to nav app,” one user explains on the linked reddit thread.
“Noticed it this morning and was so frustrated that I couldn’t adjust my podcast volume,” someone else adds, with several users originally blaming their cars for the problem without thinking that a third-party app was causing the whole thing.
By the looks of things, the only workaround is to just disconnect the iPhone and connect it back to the car, albeit some say this doesn’t always work on the first attempt. In other words, it takes several attempts to restore the volume control in CarPlay.
Of course, downgrading to the previous Waze version that wasn’t causing the problem isn’t possible in the iOS ecosystem (as it is on Android, for example). So users who have already installed the latest Waze version on their iPhones are stuck with it, while everyone else should avoid updating the application especially if they’re using CarPlay.
Neither parent company Google nor Waze commented on the bug, so for now, it’s still not known when a fix is supposed to land. But given this appears to be a widespread problem hitting more than a handful of devices, there’s no doubt a patch must be released as soon as possible.