Nissan's official mobile app for their LEAF electric car doesn't have a widget for quickly checking the car's battery charge status on your phone's home screen, so for a fun side project I decided to make my own using free tools like GitHub Actions, Appium, Tailscale, and Apple Shortcuts.
Readit News
Like all similar "why don't they have at least a self/community-supported open basic API" questions, the answer is usually the same: They're afraid someone else might create something of value, in part using their API, without them getting their own beaks wet in the process. If you want to integrate with a Nissan Leaf, even if all you wanted were the most harmless read-only access, they'd like you to request a biz dev meeting with them where they'll be happy to talk ruinous terms.
For a related story, see how Chamberlain (MyQ) torched the great, community-built Home Assistant integration it once had for no reason at all. They're afraid somehow they could stop getting the kickbacks from the likes of Walmart and Amazon delivery which they enjoy today, seeing themselves as co-owners of your garage door.
In most cases it's not about profit, but about having to invest serious amounts of effort to please one or two hackers, who will then DoS your API as soon as you've made a mistake.
Had the whole setup been local first, they wouldn't ever had that issue. But again, that makes it hard to charge people for using it.
This was reported in the media which caused Nissan to start locking down their API something fierce.
Then the three years free of many services have started to expire for most vehicles, so locking it down more became a potentially profitable exercise so now they actual have development work against it.
If you want to have some unified API check https://enode.com/connect, but that too costs a premium.
Is this a fundamental limitation of iOS widgets/APIs, or just something WhatsApp hasn't implemented? Curious if others have found better ways to handle this on iPhone.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-the-WhatsApp-wid...
More like an unfair anti-feature
It's unfortunate that newer cars are not supported.
(yes I know manufacturer tools go deeper but that's another issue)
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act
So it is arguably more dangerous and leads to fewer sales. But again businesses don’t take positions that are rational if they can take an irrational position that every other business in the sector also takes and therefore easily justify to shareholders without having to present actual numbers they might reject anyhow.
The differentiating factor between car models is not the hardware in the world of EVs. It's the software. And right now, if you aren't either on Tesla, Rivian, or Polestar the software experience is horrific.
Tesla has some great software ideas, and awful execution. Yes, they have the ability to continuously improve vehicles after sale and they use it. But they use it to scramble the climate control location every third month, and to charge subscriptions for hardware their customers already bought.
It's whackadoodle. I mean how different are cars, really? They have wheels, doors, windows, odometers, go places at various speeds, need fuel ... you'd think there'd be some agreed universal baseline like MIDI ... you'd think.
And the manufacturers held on to their protocols like they had done their own Manhatten project so everyone just had to backwards engineer things.
Why is inoperability so precious? Ultimately the purchasing decision is the car's price, features, availability, terms of the deal... The phone app has nothing to do with it, let it go.
-my backup phone connected to my NAS, running a signed in polestar app - a homebridge plugin that called a shell script that used adb to unlock the phone, open the app, grab the screen contents and parse it.
Boom, lock and battery status in homebridge and access to dozens of other tools for creating widgets and shortcuts.
Deleted Comment