Blink Charging UK & Ireland

Difficulty connecting to charging point, despite being a robust and new location within a populated city centre multi-story car parking lot that I found myself on one afternoon. Once finally connected (over 30mins trying). A very slow 3kw charging speed was available. In addition to this, several days later, the pre-authorisation amount has still not been released back into my bank. And the significantly less 'actual cost of charge' was debited over several days ago. Blink Customer Support state they have no control over release of the pre-authorisation of £30 and it can take 30 days. It’s not a large amount of money. But the principle of an appalling service. First time using Blink. And will be my last. Other providers are much better, priced, more efficient, with much better charging speeds. I’ll stick with the multitude of other options in my area. And advise others to avoid Blink charging where possible.

Have been using the app for the last 4 years but was faced with a problem today because it requested I register my details - as if I were using the app for the first time?! Needless to say when I tried to ‘register’ I was presented with an error message! I had in fact been logged out of the app (I guess following the 27th May software update) but was not presented with the option to log back in.

I’m trying to stick to reviewing the app here rather than the Blink charging network itself (which is generally fine if overpriced) — this app is another terrible example of someone reinventing a bunch of iOS functionality with their own much less well designed alternatives. Want to quickly login or signup with your Apple ID? Nope. Pay quickly via Apple Pay? Nope, get your card out because you’ve got to go through a poorly designed payment verification process (which doesn’t handle 2FA or SCA well at all). Did you sign up with the wrong country? Inexplicably you’ll have to delete your account and start again to change that. Then when it comes to finding the right charger to start your charge, you’ll have to enter a convoluted charger ID — because finding one individual charger via the map in a bank of 10 or so is made far more difficult because the charger IDs aren’t displayed! Nor are the chargers even shown in number order. So either type in the long ID or try every single charger until you find yours (and then in my case you’ll find that the charger ID in the app didn’t match the physical charger anyway) You’ll use this app because you need to charge at their chargers, but you’ll absolutely hate it. There’s no need for it to be this bad, especially considering the amount of money they take for a charge.