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Comment by aka13_404 | Hacker News Reader

This is sadly not even the full extent of it. What they did is, they locked their api entirely for anything that is not play protect certified. That means, all the cool stuff that was doable via community-driven projects is now dead in the water.

The "app" they provide is 60% advertisement, 30% features, and I unironically preferred using a Home Assistant connection instead of of it for everything. Even for automations like "when to preheat the car", since that was easier and more intuitive outside of their native function.

This also means, that charge control from the cars side is not possible to automate anymore.

Sure, one could take the position "but it was never officially promised", but for some people, including me, having the api (which is paid btw) was a selling point.

Yes, I registered specifically for this comment.

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Car apps, beside Tesla, are universally awful to use. Even Tesla's is not beyond reproach (app size is massive, for one), but at least it doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out. Apple should make a "Cars" app that's like the "Watch" app and let them standardize.

Why does a car even need an app? Don't they have a screen and internet connection on the car itself?

Why does a car even need an Internet connection? I'd prefer a car without. I recently bought a 2024 model Chinese EV, and it doesn't seem to have an internet connection of its own. Neither does it seem to have an app.

Reasons I could think of for an app: Remotely check battery charge, and that would purely be for interest rather than necessity.

I get why people might like or want remote heating/cooling as well, and I'd probably use it if I had it, but it would be an exceedingly rare occurrence (although I'm more sensitive than most as to becoming a 'soft' human being).

> I recently bought a 2024 model Chinese EV, and it doesn't seem to have an internet connection of its own.

That you know of...

Starting my heating/airco at a distance, checking whether the car is charged so I can continue my trip, exporting charging session for my accountant, ...

It's for when you are not in the car. E.g. notifying you the car has finished charging or to start heating in winter.

tesla is worse and starts from zero - you can't buy a tesla without installing the app.

I feel you. From my side I try to complain / rate / review every time, even if it's a low effort action, to cost them time and in the case of the regulated companies, to slightly worsen their complaint stats.

There's enough of users to start making a difference. Really, even a low effort action raising valid concerns (security theater, a lie, google's monopolistic position, anti-competitive, etc), keywords that will make their response more careful and potential complaint to the regulator more impactful.

Things like this can actually be a good way to nudge a company in the right direction sometimes. Nobody uses those internal review systems, and sometimes their stats are actually important. A handful of users might make up a really big chunk of the reviews.

In a similar vein, I once met a woman who told me how she would enter every single one of those stupid contests that you'd see printed on cereal boxes and ice cream containers because literally five people enter into those things, so you're odds of winning are surprisingly high. Apparently she won a bunch of them, but her favorite was when got a week long vacation that included going on a fishing trip with Ben and Jerry of "Ben and Jerry's".

%s/you\'re/your/

So "Play Protect" is doing all the damage to the third-party ecosystem that it'd seemed designed for.

I've slowly but surely been moving away from any service provider of any type who does not allow me to use their service without their often Play Services-dependent app. Changing vehicles would be a lot harder though.

Developers have to go out of their way to implement triggering Play Integrity API checks in their app and then retrieve the results to check on their services. They're putting a lot of effort into banning anything not licensing Google Mobile Services. It's definitely not a security feature since it permits devices with no security updates for more than 8 years but not a far more secure OS than anything Google certifies. Google doesn't allow GrapheneOS to obtain certification and certification comes with highly anti-competitive rules which would be completely unacceptable. Their licensing system has been ruled illegal in South Korea and other countries should not only do the same but ban the Play Integrity API and other related anti-competitive features. These are not actual security features and that's an excuse for the actual purpose of enforcing their GMS licensing model including forcing including a bunch of Google apps with extremely privileged access and using their builds of many OS components shipped from the Play Store.

I feel like that should be a warranty claim. You sold me one car with a specific set of features and now you've updated it into a different one lacking those features. It's not the same car. You broke it. Fix it or pay me for it's value.

They have plenty of boilerplate in the warranty to be sure they don't have to pay you for this.

Fortunately the government has demonstrated that it can regulate the terms of warranties.

Rivian would have gone out of business a year ago if VW had not approached them with an offer of $5.8B to rewrite all of VW's car software [0]. Because VW knew their own software sucked.

I wonder if this is a result of Rivian writing VW's software or if that effort hasn't yet borne fruit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivian_and_Volkswagen_Group_Te...

It hurts anytime there is a subscription intermediary and people are being trained to think this should be the case.

Iroh networking can't become a standard fast enough.

https://www.iroh.computer/

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