Kia Connect

***Update to review: An app update was released and it STILL sends erroneous car unlocked notifications. PLUS it WILL NOT connect to the car to send any commands, just comes up with a server error message and is stuck on a ‘getting information from car’ loop. This is getting beyond a joke!!!! Original review: Alert Services tab doesn’t work - network error. Erroneous unlocked door notifications - it’s locked. Will pair with car but won’t upload contacts or almost any data and after turning off ignition: up pops an error message saying network error, Kia connect unavailable. All this after the update that was forced on users when Kia Connect upgraded its servers or whatever the message said. Have tried to log out of app and log back in. Have tried to force close app and reopen. Have tried deleting app and reinstalling. Have tried to re-pair phone/app with car. Have tried a hard reset on car infotainment dash. NOTHING WORKS. At first it appears to work until the ignition is turned off and the error message comes up and then the erroneous car unlocked notification comes up too.

This app provides great features for my ev. It lets me monitor charging, turn on the air conditioning, check efficiency of the last trip, lock and unlock the car, and heaps more. However, it’s really important to note that it doesn’t connect directly to the car. It connects to Kia servers on the moon*, and those servers connect to your car. So every message you get from the car or send to the car needs to make a full round trip to and from your car via the moon* and that takes an awkward amount of time. Sometimes the servers on the moon* are inaccessible or broken or something. Usually on a weekend, like right now. And then the app just gives you a network error and tells you to try again later and call customer service if it keeps being broken. So that’s pretty frustrating. * the servers may not actually be on the moon. They may be somewhere on earth far far away from Australia. Maybe there are multiple microservices involved scattered across the earth and to do anything at all there need to be dozens of calls made between the phone, car and servers that together add up to feel like the server is on the moon. I genuinely wonder if it works fine in Korea or the US or wherever the servers are, and the engineers just haven’t thought about the fact that they need to do fewer requests to service each user action in order to cut down on latency if it’s going to be usable anywhere else.

Got an EV 9 this week and registered with this app. Still to try most features on this app but so far so good EXCEPT why is there no support for Digital Key 2 & NFC key in Australia? It’s supported for EV9 in USA but it’s nowhere to be found on the menus in Australia (and I wasted AGES looking for it in the app and car menus!) Is it coming in a later update? Why can’t we get that feature here? Also: why can’t Kia document what is and isn’t available in Australia so customers don’t waste their time searching for what’s not there?