Cowboy (VanMoof competitor) have built an app[1] to let you save the encryption key used to unlock the bike, if you're worried about the VanMoof app going down.
The real pain here is all of the annoying brittle and priority parts in the bike. The next time your eshifter dies, that's it.
https://support.vanmoof.com/en/support/solutions/articles/44...
I think it's worth adding to this the official statement from Vanmoof, as overall I think it does have most of the information that owners would like.
Kind of a shame that the so many Dutch people are getting screwed here, but the repair shop owners/workers from the article describe a very locked-down bike seemingly designed to be a lock-in device, not a useful bike.†
I've been in Rotterdam for a good amount of time (and Amsterdam naturally) and even knowing that everyone in these cities bikes doesn't prepare you for how much the Dutch have integrated biking into their cities. It's very impressive and enviable, and plenty of options for persons who do need other transport options.
From my perspective, trying to do vendor lock-in on a bicycle is a bad idea; transport needs to be treated like a utility, and purposefully making a device that requires a company to exist to give you permission/parts to use this utility while there are dozens if not hundreds of non-locked-down options just seems like an awful business idea, especially when the model has been "open" for almost 200 years and bicycle engineering is already extremely efficient and user friendly without the vendor lock-in. Whether it's locked in by code or by non-open hardware, trying to capture what is basically a utility (transportation) is a dumb.
† I understand that many users liked the bike design, but in my opinion, if repair shops are having to crack open the bike frame or can't use normal bike parts to fix it, it's a bad bike.
I'm pretty sure the business plan here was to generate "recurring revenue" by "vertical integration" in the "long tail" or some collection of buzzwords like that but it boils down to making customers depend on you after the sale and forcing them to come back to you for anything they need.
This reminds me of how software is becoming increasingly subscription based and triple-A games have moved to "live services" and "season passes" as a business model. I guess at least Van Moof actually sold you the bike and didn't make you rent it.
The potential loss for the customers would have been much lower if they had rented the bikes for, say, one month at a time. They might lose some days of paid usage in the worst case (as it now seems to be, they would not have lost anything in that one-month-rent case). But then they could switch to any competitor.
I guess sometimes renting is not tightening the vendor lock-in, compared to buying.
https://www.deondernemer.nl/innovatie/technologie/vanmoof-eb...
So seems like most Van Moof's can be repaired in the end.
That thing seems a bit delicate/fragile for a bike.
** For now. Also Cowboy's app does not (cannot?) support all models.