Okay, so I now have a smooth-operating CarPlay system going, thanks to my iPhone X, but here's the problem. It's two-fold, actually.

1) CarPlay is heavy-handed and restrictive in what it allows.
- You cannot see more than a couple of favorited stations or presets at a time (for "safety").
2) You cannot see you texts, ever.
3) You cannot scroll through your iPhone's Contacts
4) It causes MORE steps, not less, and interferes with native iDrive functions, like Nav

I find CarPlay to be LESS safe than native iDrive 6, because it's at times even more demanding of driver interfacing, and worse, you have to use the touch-screen, when the iDrive controller could better accomplish certain tasks, eyes-free.

The other issue I have is TuneIN Radio. It is terrible. It does not behave like other apps (e.g. iHeartRadio), spawning automatically and appearing as a source in iDrive, and so you have to launch it manually, but it crashes the system, in terms of switching to anything else while it's playing. Unfortunately, TuneIn is one of the best internet radio apps out there, but its bad behavior makes it unacceptable in the car.

Oddly, there is an alternative, which plays nice with CarPlay, and is an officially supported app by Apple. That's MyTuner Radio. The problem is that it is NOT an officially recognized MINI Connected app. If it were, it'd also spawn automatically as an option in iDrive and we could switch between it, another app, Satellite Radio, or phone music, seamlessly.

Is there any way to get MINI to officially recognize the MyTuner Radio App, the way Apple already has?

I am about to give up on Apple CarPlay for good, and just go back to iDrive 6, but I am a huge user of internet radio, and I just wish I could get BMW/MINI to be less restrictive in whom they let into the party.