[Updated] My Porsche App updated w/ new interface and functions

[TaycanEagle]

Was really hoping they'd add the ability to lock/unlock the car from the app for those of us with a 2020. Oh well, seems silly that you can't control the locks on a 2020 when you can every other year (and every other make of car).

Was really hoping they'd add the ability to lock/unlock the car from the app for those of us with a 2020. Oh well, seems silly that you can't control the locks on a 2020 when you can every other year (and every other make of car).

Seriously! That’s my disappointment. Cars that cost less have this feature. And since we’re able to preheat/precool remotely, we should be able to lock/unlock as well.

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[Bognar67]

Accessing the car via the App (IOS/iPhone) is so much quicker now. I think this is the biggest improvement.

Absolutely. And not "just" much quicker but much reliable as well. I mean earlier I could not reach the car at not perfectly covered signal areas (my garage) a lot, but since the update it is 10/10, earlier ca. 10/6.
For me it is a real development.

 

[Oink]

Yeah, well if you don't pay you can ONLY preheat. You can't even check your battery level or whether your car is charging or not. Can't even see where the car is in the map.

 

[Bognar67]

Sure. Connect subscription is necessary for full (original) remote control. Otherwise it is valid through the full Porsche model range. After the 3-year free period annual renewal with a payment is needed.

 

[Edwos]

Do we know the earliest Apple Watch that will run the Porsche app? I'm on an old Series 2 Watch and cant get the App to load (unsurprisingly). Thinking about going for Ultra 2 as an aside, but curious as to knowing if any other early Watch 2 adopters have had more success than me in the app working on your wrist..?

 

[gramorris]

Another question in case anyone knows the solution. Can you add EV networks from outside your country to Apple Maps?

I notice @allroadusa had TotalEnergie in his app, which I can’t add and I can’t add Iberdrola in Spain. Sort of limits the usefulness for cross Europe road trips if it’s not possible.

 

[snstevens]

I've posted a new thread about upcoming CarPlay features/apps (8 of them) in 2024 here. Utility and level of integration is of course TBD.

 

[snstevens]

So "hope it starts working" is the strategy to employ here.

On the bright side, the update fixed my windows being show as open in the app, which I was unable to fix for weeks now. Ok, I stopped after reclosing all windows a couple times and restarting the app.


EDIT: rebooting watch didn't help. What did help is killing both the phone and watch app, then starting them back up.

Correct. To get Miles on both your watch and the app you need to shut them both down and then start the My Porsche app on your phone followed by the My Porsche app on your watch.

Also, for those who are missing the complication, I moved the My Porsche app to the top row of the app Grid view. This makes it quickly available by either swipe up (scroll to the bottom) or single tap on the crown.

 

[refazi]

the Apple Maps EV route planning is not new with this App update, it's just nice but it's not accurate and many times i get this "Battery info not found error" even on the latest iOS, not sure if it's a car problem or an Apple problem, anyone tried that with other EVs?

 

[snstevens]

the Apple Maps EV route planning is not new with this App update, it's just nice but it's not accurate and many times i get this "Battery info not found error" even on the latest iOS, not sure if it's a car problem or an Apple problem, anyone tried that with other EVs?

This happened to me several times when the Apple Maps integration for charging was added, but it hasn’t happened recently. I think the connection between iOS and PCM is stronger after several iOS updates.

 

[tigerbalm]

the Apple Maps EV route planning is not new with this App update

It was a US only feature until this release. Now it is released to more (all?) countries.

 

[satchurator]

In defense of big company software development teams vs lone wolf developers - to an onlooker, the productivity difference can appear huge, but there are often lots of non-apparent constraints and non-obvious-but-necessary work. Guessed examples for the revamped My Porsche app:

• Time elapsed on User Research and Analytics efforts, Product Designers studying the current user base to inform the new visual design system and app user experience.
• Building out with a cross-platform mobile development framework such as React Native OR coordination of 2x the effort in building identical feature-parity experiences for both iOS and Android.
• Selectively porting or preserving existing portions of the app, moving those into a new app framework.
• Implementing a new visual design system, not only on new screens but adapting pre-existing screens to that.
• Coordinating with neighboring back-end teams on new functionality.
• Localization (translation) for all of the different countries where the app will be released.
• Time elapsed on private beta testing, A/B testing of the new experience, iteration on usability findings etc.
• Ongoing maintenance of the current (now previous) version of the app.
• Parallel stream efforts on longer term projects such as CarPlay V2.

The lone wolf developer has very few of these kinds of constraints, but they face others:

• They don't have blanket access to the entire tech stack (in this case), limited to the 'public' APIs
• The economics of a companion app are such that they can't make much/any money from it.

If an otherise slow-moving big company dev team were to throw caution to the wind and just wing-it with a rapid stream of consciousness build out of <whatever>, the end-user narrative would quickly become a lamentation of mass defects and inconsistency.

I wanted to share this perspective. There are lots of smart people working on this stuff at Porsche, it's not that they are slow, they are doing a bunch of other work that a lone wolf would never have to care about.

(I still reserve the right to bitch and moan about Porsche software quality - all automakers seem to struggle with it)

 

[electricsidecar]

In defense of big company software development teams vs lone wolf developers - to an onlooker, the productivity difference can appear huge, but there are often lots of non-apparent constraints and non-obvious-but-necessary work. Guessed examples for the revamped My Porsche app:

• Time elapsed on User Research and Analytics efforts, Product Designers studying the current user base to inform the new visual design system and app user experience.
• Building out with a cross-platform mobile development framework such as React Native OR coordination of 2x the effort in building identical feature-parity experiences for both iOS and Android.
• Selectively porting or preserving existing portions of the app, moving those into a new app framework.
• Implementing a new visual design system, not only on new screens but adapting pre-existing screens to that.
• Coordinating with neighboring back-end teams on new functionality.
• Localization (translation) for all of the different countries where the app will be released.
• Time elapsed on private beta testing, A/B testing of the new experience, iteration on usability findings etc.
• Ongoing maintenance of the current (now previous) version of the app.
• Parallel stream efforts on longer term projects such as CarPlay V2.

The lone wolf developer has very few of these kinds of constraints, but they face others:

• They don't have blanket access to the entire tech stack (in this case), limited to the 'public' APIs
• The economics of a companion app are such that they can't make much/any money from it.

If an otherise slow-moving big company dev team were to throw caution to the wind and just wing-it with a rapid stream of consciousness build out of <whatever>, the end-user narrative would quickly become a lamentation of mass defects and inconsistency.

I wanted to share this perspective. There are lots of smart people working on this stuff at Porsche, it's not that they are slow, they are doing a bunch of other work that a lone wolf would never have to care about.

(I still reserve the right to bitch and moan about Porsche software quality - all automakers seem to struggle with it)

+1000 this. The reason I’m building Electric Sidecar is because I very much understand the constraints going on in a large company. It’s understandable that the return on time spend for a feature that might be used by <5% of your user base isn’t a top priority, and then you pair in all of the legacy stuff mentioned above and I *guarantee* you there’s a non-zero number of engineers at Porsche who’d love nothing more than to build similar long-tail features to what Electric Sidecar offers, but can’t due to organizational priorities.

I’m aiming for Electric Sidecar to complement the OEM experience, and both getting better because of each other is a great outcome for all of us imho

 

[satchurator]

+1000 this. The reason I’m building Electric Sidecar is because I very much understand the constraints going on in a large company. It’s understandable that the return on time spend for a feature that might be used by <5% of your user base isn’t a top priority, and then you pair in all of the legacy stuff mentioned above and I *guarantee* you there’s a non-zero number of engineers at Porsche who’d love nothing more than to build similar long-tail features to what Electric Sidecar offers, but can’t due to organizational priorities.

I’m aiming for Electric Sidecar to complement the OEM experience, and both getting better because of each other is a great outcome for all of us imho

Spot on, @featherless. You are doing noble work and it's worthwhile! Things like Electric Sidecar serve an important purpose and can actually influence the big company in whose orbit the app exists - if only by showing what’s possible, and demonstrating user demand for a particular feature.

Big companies sometimes will have hackathons, where the typical constraints are set aside and the software developers are encouraged to ‘have at it’ to explore an idea. While these ideas rarely ship, sometimes they are the seed for a new feature or capability that eventually does ship.

In app development, the big companies also take inspiration from their contemporaries and indie developers. It’s not fun to get Sherlocked when there’s money at stake, but there are plenty of examples of Apple seeing a successful indie-developed feature or app and then building their take on it and bringing it to the mass market. I'd be shocked if the iOS developers at Porsche Digital weren't aware of Electric Sidecar.

 

[ciaranob]

In defense of big company software development teams vs lone wolf developers - to an onlooker, the productivity difference can appear huge, but there are often lots of non-apparent constraints and non-obvious-but-necessary work. Guessed examples for the revamped My Porsche app:

• Time elapsed on User Research and Analytics efforts, Product Designers studying the current user base to inform the new visual design system and app user experience.
• Building out with a cross-platform mobile development framework such as React Native OR coordination of 2x the effort in building identical feature-parity experiences for both iOS and Android.
• Selectively porting or preserving existing portions of the app, moving those into a new app framework.
• Implementing a new visual design system, not only on new screens but adapting pre-existing screens to that.
• Coordinating with neighboring back-end teams on new functionality.
• Localization (translation) for all of the different countries where the app will be released.
• Time elapsed on private beta testing, A/B testing of the new experience, iteration on usability findings etc.
• Ongoing maintenance of the current (now previous) version of the app.
• Parallel stream efforts on longer term projects such as CarPlay V2.

The lone wolf developer has very few of these kinds of constraints, but they face others:

• They don't have blanket access to the entire tech stack (in this case), limited to the 'public' APIs
• The economics of a companion app are such that they can't make much/any money from it.

If an otherise slow-moving big company dev team were to throw caution to the wind and just wing-it with a rapid stream of consciousness build out of <whatever>, the end-user narrative would quickly become a lamentation of mass defects and inconsistency.

I wanted to share this perspective. There are lots of smart people working on this stuff at Porsche, it's not that they are slow, they are doing a bunch of other work that a lone wolf would never have to care about.

(I still reserve the right to bitch and moan about Porsche software quality - all automakers seem to struggle with it)

Sorry not buying it - having worked for a major multinational corp for over 30 years and as a private contractor I don’t disagree with your pts. re constraints in the corp. space, believe me I am more than familiar but this is not an excuse for the delays we’ve seen in the Porsche app dev over 3+ years.

Again I never said the progress was bad (so the response a little OTT ), just underwhelming.

Competitor corporations with entirely similar constraints are imo miles ahead with their app dev - my prev 2014 M4 app arguably had more functionality and most def our lowly Mini 2024 app has everything and more compared to the MyPorshe app including fully functioning phone & desktop widgets and Watch complications. Despite working with Apple directly Porsche couldn’t manage to provide a watch complication!?

Again, I’m sure we’ll get there but color me less than impressed with the rate of updates to date.

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