If this is a VanMoof, I believe they were sold in Japan and even had a Store in Shibuya
Secondly, they were bankrupt, but to my knowledge were bought and is therefore still (again?) in business.
- We tried a few times to recover the account but had some trouble with CS and the particular account, so ended up giving on that. It didn't help that he visits the country from time to time and we'd need to migrate the account each time.
I've owned a lot of VanMoofs. You absolutely do not need to use the app to interact with the lights, they are automatic. If the bike is misconfigured, it takes about 30 seconds to reset its preferences with a physical button accessible from the exterior, since the SX2.
Your friend may have bought a broken VanMoof.
The explanation is that it's one of the first generation ones. Originally there was a single push button outside on the handle, for the Bell, and a single charging micro-USB.