CarPlay: CPListTemplate item limit and image memory usage

Question

Volodymyr Klymenko OP

Created Sep ’25

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I’m working with CPListTemplate in CarPlay and have run into two issues:

Item limit: The documentation states that maximumItemCount is 500. In practice, when providing a list of ~2–4k items, only the first 500 are displayed. However, Apple Music on CarPlay seems to handle larger lists without this limitation. Is there an API-level approach or recommended pattern to support lists beyond this cap?
Image memory usage: Cells don’t appear to load lazily. Even with small images, the first 500 items load all their artwork into memory immediately, resulting in ~400–700 MB usage and high CPU loads. This seems excessive for CarPlay environments. Is there a best practice for deferring or managing image loading within CPListTemplate?

Any official guidance or known workarounds for these two issues would be very helpful.

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

4d

Hi,

Both situations are known. 500 is the limit for apps. That's worth filing an enhancement request (same as a bug report but to be treated as an enhancement).

As you've noticed as well, images are not lazy loaded. Also worth filing an enhancement request. To make the process go "faster" make sure your image sizes aren't larger than the maximum size provided by the given list item. You can also file this as a bug report and please include a time profile.

If you can file, I'll do my best to get a response for you.

Rico
Car Experience - Software Engineer

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