myToyota Connect

For the first 12 months of my new car I had 12 complementary Toyota connect, I thought nothing of it and used the car like any other car I have owned. 12 months later and the complementary subscription ends, I figure I don’t need remote unlock or remote start so why bother paying for a feature I don’t use? Turns out that’s not the case. My entire profile has been wiped from the car. The ability to create a local profile, non-existent. Seat memory, gone. Instrument cluster settings, gone. All the annoying beeps I switched off, back. Remembering what phone belongs to what driver, gone. The equaliser for the stereo, gone. Not gone as in reset, gone as in I no longer have the privilege of changing the bass or treble on my stereo. Why on earth Toyota thinks it’s acceptable to lock features from the early 2000’s behind a $10/month paywall is astounding and a needless money grab. Don’t waste your time with this app and if you haven’t already paid for the Toyota you’re looking at buying, look elsewhere. I certainly won’t be buying a Toyota for my next vehicle.

The latest update is a huge step backwards. Aside from the fact that it frequently logs me out and it can be tricky to log back in, it is hard to find anything. I loved the previous app as everything was so accessible on the front page. There seems to be a lot less features now. The app has always mistakenly alerted me to my boot being open (even if not) and this wasn’t fixed in the update, yet I now can’t see the status of individual doors and windows, just a blanket ‘unlocked’ or ‘open’ for all doors. Seems a bit rough to charge money for something that you then change so significantly that it becomes hard to use and remove some features.

I use this app mostly on colder mornings to warm up my RAV4 remotely. Suddenly it looks different! Works great for that but always found the design could be a bit more intuitive and sharper. Looks like they have fixed that so for me, this app is a winner. I haven’t had a lot of the issues people have shared here so maybe it’s a device thing.