In the ongoing saga of trying to make driving my Mustang as pleasant of an experience as possible, I spent a few weeks trying to find a proper phone mount. This isn’t something I wanted to do. With my iPhone 8 I had a pretty simple but reliable vent mount from Koomis but when I foolishly upgrade to the iPhone XR, which is comically large (I will admit the camera is pretty nice though), I needed something that would hold the weight of the larger phone plus the additional weight of the case. I’m not really big on having a ton of technology in my cars (I bought a base model Mustang GT which has pretty much no technology options) but I do want my phone to be able to link up so I can listen to my music and I need the phone mounted safely in my line of vision for when I’m using a maps app to get around.

I read good things about the Kenu Aiframe+ so I went ahead and ordered one. The quality was good and the mount itself fit around my phone with the case. Unfortunately the part where the mount connects to the air vent was too short for the Mustang, partially because there’s a bit of a ledge that comes out over the air vent.

The ledge

Here you can see a little bit more clearly how much the ledge sticks out

I returned the Kenu and set out to find a solution through some good old fashioned in-person shopping. I found nothing worth even testing at Auto Zone or Advance Auto Parts, at least the stores close to where I live, which was pretty disappointing. At Best Buy I picked up this example from iOttie. This mount fell out of the air vent as soon as I put the phone in, no matter how hard I tried to lock it. I also looked at one at Costco, the Scosche Magic Mount, but after reading a load of bad reviews online, many which specifically mentioned that mount not being able to hold the weight of certain phones, I decided to pass.

At this point I gave up on a vent mount for the giant iPhone. I went back to my laptop (which is only a little bit bigger than my iPhone) and tried to find some solutions on YouTube. Fortunately I came across a video from a channel called “Dad Doing Stuff” that figured out a solution using some GoPro components, which also led me to this video on a channel called “Iftibashir” highlighting the SP Gadgets phone mount. I reached out to the folks at SP Gadgets to see if they thought their mount would fit my iPhone XR with Trianium case. To their credit, they didn’t just say yes to get me to buy something. They said they knew the mount would work with the iPhone XR but weren’t positive it would work with the case. I decided to give it a try and I figured worst case scenario, if the mount was sturdy enough, I’d find a smaller case.

Using a GoPro sticky pad that I had originally purchased over seven years ago (!!!) and that I was using to put my GoPro on the dash to record in-car videos, I was able to make the SP Gadgets mount work. You can see how it looks and sits in this video I made here:

This solution is probably tailored more to folks with 2005-2014 Mustangs but maybe there are other vehicles and drivers having issues with finding a sturdy mount for their larger phones so I hope this can be helpful. Thanks for watching and reading. 🙂