I have a Carlinkit CP200-CCPA dongle that I bought back in 2020 for my Audi S4. For the most part it works fine but it's not without bugs! The issues I've seen may be the dongle or just some odd compatibility with Audi's infotainment. I'm not sure. I haven't tried any other dongles.
The main one is that the CarPlay screen or "App" that you look at and interact with on the display sometimes minimises like when you press a button on the infotainment system to open something else and can't be re-opened until you disconnect/re-connect the dongle from the USB port and wait for the phone to re-connect. This only happens at random when the parking sensor screen pops up, but not every time. There's something about the parking sensor screen that has like a 1 in 5 chance of killing the CarPlay screen. When it happens CarPlay is still connected and working but you have no way of seeing it or interacting with it. Frustrating when you're using it for satnav as you can't see the map!
The other marginally less annoying bug is if you get a call while listening to music or a podcast or something via CarPlay and decline the call using the car controls, CarPlay is unable to output sound anymore despite songs and podcasts still playing. I don't know if this is an iPhone or CarPlay specific bug or again something to do with the dongle I have (likely!). A few times I've been able to fix it by flicking between radio and back to CarPlay but most of the time it also requires the dongle to be disconnected/re-connected and wait for the phone to re-connect.
The last bug that is more minor but still annoying is if my phone doesn't auto-connect like it does 90% of the time. Usually because I'm not fully in range of the wifi while closing driveway gates or something. When this happens it seems the menu and controls to manually connect a phone get's jumbled up. By default the selector is on the phone so in theory you just need to click the Audi's rotary selector wheel to start the connection but it does nothing until you rotate the selector to another menu option and back again to the phone. But oh the fun doesn't end there....depending on which way you decide to rotate the onscreen selector, clicking the rotary wheel down to connect with the phone when it's back on the phone will not trigger the phone connection, but instead rotates the selector again to the next menu option. You can quite easily spend a couple of minutes just trying to get the selector in the right place and doing what it should.
For a lot of journeys none of these things are an issue but when they crop up it's just bloody annoying. As a heavy user of CarPlay I think I'll be looking for full wireless integration on my next car to avoid having to use a random dongle in the hopes that I won't see these niggles.
