960km range

Car Apps That Don’t Work

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I am fatigued by cars and their apps. When I was using the Citroën car twice a week it was working fine but then I let it sit for a month and then it stopped synching correctly. I have done several trips now, and the journeys are either not recorded properly or the date is a month out of sync with the journey.

I tried to pair a Fiat500e with a phone or two via two or three aps and here too I failed. I can only conclude that mobile phone car apps are crap, on android and iOS. I can’t understand that with the most expensive device any of us will pair with our phones, that their apps are so crap.

What frustrates me is that when you’re pairing an app on a car you need to be above ground and in range of wifi or mobile phone signals for it to work.

I would expect a car app to work like Garmin connect, Suunto, Strava and other such apps. I would expect it to work flawlessly. It doesn’t.

I don’t understand why mobile phone apps for cars are so badly designed and unreliable. It isn’t that complicated to make an app that works, and it’s not that we swap cars more than once every few years. There is no rational reason for the apps not to work. I think car apps are simply badly designed.

With the Fiat I gave up. It’s both frustrating and a waste of time to pair an App to a car. With the Citroën it was working, until it stopped working after a month of sitting in a garage.

Now the question is, do I take the car, park it above ground, spend half an hour trying to pair, and see it break again next time I let the car sit, or do I just give up and use Google Latitude and Waze to keep track?

I’m frustrated. No other paired device is this unreliable.