My Renault 4+

Buggy with a lot of room for improvement

I am using the app with my Zoe R135 and I am using the app almost daily. The app mostly works fine for me when it comes to checking the battery SoC and starting the preconditioning. Unfortunately it is still far from perfect and I have a few things I would love to get improved or fixed.

1. The app is not very reliable and sometimes simply doesn’t work. I quite often just get a message about some server error when I start the app. It often works after I have restarted the app a few times but I have also had to reinstall the app once when it stopped working for weeks. After reinstalling the app it suddenly worked again. An app that I often use multiple times a day should be way more reliable.

2. It is not possible to start the preconditioning of the car when the battery SoC (state of charge) is below 40%. I simply do not understand why this is the case. With 40% on my latest generation Renault Zoe I have almost always more than 100 km of range left. When I heat up or cool down the car it never uses more than 1%. Why doesn’t the app allow me to start the preconditioning then? It should definitely be up to me if I want to start the preconditioning below 40%. Is it possible to lower that limit to 10% or 20% maybe? That would make way more sense since that actually is a little close to 0%. 40% is almost half of the range left.

3. I can’t really see how fast the car is charging. The only thing the app and the car tells me is the time left to 100%. Since the charging curve is not linear it is not really possible to tell with which power the car is charging. Since the car and/or the app can calculate the time remaining it should be able to tell my how many kW it is charging with. That would extremely useful so that I can see if the charging point actually has the power it is supposed to have. It would also be extremely helpful when using fast chargers. If I’m on a road trip it would be stupid to wait for the car to reach 100% since the fast charger is charging very slow close to 100%. If you don’t want to show me how many kW, please let me check the time left to 80% or another SoC that I can choose by myself. That would be way more useful for road trips since it would be stupid to let the car charge to 100% when it is charging extremely slow at the end.

Hopefully these issues and improvements are possible to fix with software updates at some point!

Svar från utvecklaren ,

Dear Melker,
Thank you for your feedback.
We value your opinion highly and we have escalated this to the correct department.
If you ever have any questions or need any help, please don't hesitate to contact us at 0771–345 666.
Best regards,
Customer Service.

Low on features, bad gui, and unreliable

Have been using the app for almost every day for a year now. Vehicle Zoe R135 2020. I use the app for checking status of the battery and activation of the climate system (preconditioning).

Issues listed from other reviewers here from years back still haven’t been resolved, Renault doesn’t seem to care about their customers once they’ve bought the vehicle. So don’t hold your breath.

The good:
Well, sometimes it lets you do the few things it can do.
There’s a nice widget that [sometimes] let you start the climate system [preconditioning] with one press of a button. It works about 60% of the times.

The bad:
- Everything. None of the developers or any one from management can be a user of the app. It’s unbelievably bad. And if remains equally bad year by year. The developers appear to be twenty something kids that never actually have figured out what the app is for or who the target demographic is.
- It typically takes several tries to do something.
- Randomly it looses your login info. Strangely restarting the app four or six times seem to solve the login. So it really hasn’t lost your login, it just woke up on the wrong side.
- The information shown is seldom reliable. There’s no timestamp on it. It can say “charging ongoing” with an active animation, and give a percentage of charge, even if the car have been disconnected hours ago and driven several miles, thus actually having an altogether different status and state of charge than the shown.
- You can request an update by pulling down on the interface. Maybe. It displays a busy symbol, but it randomly contacts the vehicle. At times it never contacts the vehicle. So you end up trying a few times but then give up. If it didn’t update within four or five tries, it never will, until you get to the car or something. It’s unclear when it will work again, or why.
- Information given at your phone’s notification centre (obviously triggered by the app) is somehow not always shown in the app. I.e. the app can tell you one thing via the notifications yet show something different in the app (for something like the state of charge).
- The notifications is littered with meaningless icons that takes up so much space that the words ‘stop’ or ‘started’ is not shown (the text is too long). It says “Your charge has (#something#)”. It could easily be solved by removing the meaningless icons, or the order of the wording. If anyone at Renault cared or had two brain cells.
- If you press on the notification you get sent to the app, however the app is totally oblivious of whatever notification messages it has sent out.
- It typically rains useless notifications from the app. During a charge session you can easily get four to ten notifications. All completely impossible to interpret due to the fact that vital words isn’t shown. All you know is that something has happened. Or not happened. You may leave the vehicle to charge, get notifications of something happening, return hours later to drive somewhere, only to find out that no charge has taken place. It’s a complete guesswork. Obviously without having been given any reason to why it didn’t fancy charging that day.
- There’s notifications in the app as well. If you send a command/request you’re sometimes given a feedback of it having been received by the car and/or if it did work. This is shown by a green or orange notification that is temporarily shown at the top of the app. For about two seconds. Then there’s not a trace of it in the app. You can’t find those notifications anywhere, there’s no way of bringing them back either.
- If you send a command/request from the app to the vehicle, there’s nothing that shows that you’ve done that. Nor what the car responded with. Like sent this [timestamp], response [timestamp]. Nothing like that. There are some live animations that sometimes show something. The result is that you need to stay glued to the screen for the request to reach the car and the response to come back (which takes minutes) or you’ll never know if something happened or what happened.
- Basic features works halfassed. Like you can [maybe] start charging via the app. If it doesn’t wanna start you’ll get no feedback on why. Neither in the app or the car. Blind trail and error is melody.
- You can’t ever stop the charging.
- The time calculation/estimate for reaching full charge is often wrong.
- It doesn’t show the rate of charge, which it definitely knows if it can give you an estimate on how long it’s going to take to reach full charge.
- If you want to use the timer for the climate system it’s very unclear if the time you set is for when it starts [if it starts is another issue] or if it’s for when you plan to leave.
- 90% of the information in the app is useless.
- Some information is duplicated.
- Everything is in unnecessarily small lettering, yet there’s lots of unused white space on the app.

Svar från utvecklaren ,

Thank you for your feedback!

Our app is constantly evolving and we appreciate you taking the time to share your suggestions. We have passed it on to our product developers and we also advise you to update the app regularly to get the latest features.

My Renault team

Långsam

Funkar ibland, men mycket långsam och måste starta om den för att får den att fungera.