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Tesla App on Android

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#41
DEinspanjer said:
While I am an Android user as well, and I am right up there with others complaining about the second-class citizen status, I have to imagine that it is actually because they don't see enough active users to prioritize it over iOS..
Click to expand...

My point was that for what it costs to develop the apps, as compared to what it costs to build the cars, as compared to what we spend on the cars, Tesla should not be thinking about prioritizing. They should be throwing enough money at app development so that the apps can be developed at the same rate, and so that the apps can be equivalent apps. If there's something that Tesla wants us to be able to do in one of the apps, then we should be able to do it in the other app. We're not talking about Tesla having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing and machining parts. We're talking about a couple of software engineers and some coding.
 
#44
Again, from a developer on both IOS and Android platforms, IOS is significantly easier to develop for. This is because the development platform (Xcode) is significantly farther along than Android Studio and lightyears beyond Eclipse. Plus, everything is native code on the IOS platform, so a developer is not nearly as far removed from what is going on in the OS.

I've seen many developers talk that they consider it at least a 2:1 ratio of how long it takes to develop for Android vs IOS.

This is primarily the reason you see most new apps come out for IOS first, and I believe it's why the IOS app here is more finished/polished. It was simply easier to do.
 
#45
chuckd said:
I've seen many developers talk that they consider it at least a 2:1 ratio of how long it takes to develop for Android vs IOS.

This is primarily the reason you see most new apps come out for IOS first, and I believe it's why the IOS app here is more finished/polished. It was simply easier to do.
Click to expand...

That might be an acceptable answer for a three-person company, just starting out, that wanted to get an app out to some of their customers as quickly as they could. For a company the size of Tesla, if that really is the answer the situation is even more ridiculous than I thought it was.
 
#46
chuckd said:
Again, from a developer on both IOS and Android platforms, IOS is significantly easier to develop for. This is because the development platform (Xcode) is significantly farther along than Android Studio and lightyears beyond Eclipse. Plus, everything is native code on the IOS platform, so a developer is not nearly as far removed from what is going on in the OS.

I've seen many developers talk that they consider it at least a 2:1 ratio of how long it takes to develop for Android vs IOS.

This is primarily the reason you see most new apps come out for IOS first, and I believe it's why the IOS app here is more finished/polished. It was simply easier to do.
Click to expand...
That may be the case for writing the app from scratch, but it doesn't really explain the complete lack of notifications on the Android app.
 
#49
bob_p said:
Tesla may be stuck in the "develop on iPhone and then port to Android" mode - guaranteeing that Android will always lag behind the iPhone for Tesla.
Click to expand...

It may or may not be relevant, but the Android version came out first.

- - - Updated - - -

chuckd said:
I do agree with you guys. Adding push notifications to an Android app is quite easy, and there's no excuse for not implementing it.
Click to expand...

It is the excuse I mentioned earlier, in that there is a certain development framework that is for developing Android/iOS at the same time that has a known issue with push notifications for Android.

- - - Updated - - -

chuckd said:
Again, from a developer on both IOS and Android platforms, IOS is significantly easier to develop for. This is because the development platform (Xcode) is significantly farther along than Android Studio and lightyears beyond Eclipse. Plus, everything is native code on the IOS platform, so a developer is not nearly as far removed from what is going on in the OS.

I've seen many developers talk that they consider it at least a 2:1 ratio of how long it takes to develop for Android vs IOS.

This is primarily the reason you see most new apps come out for IOS first, and I believe it's why the IOS app here is more finished/polished. It was simply easier to do.
Click to expand...

All IDEs suck, and I blame them for the demise of humankind.
 
#50
Lol, if Windows could just take over the phone market, we'd all be much happier with Visual Studio. It's the best IDE I've seen so far.

Didn't know that the Android version came out first, that's sad. I'd be happy to share code with Tesla how to add push notifications to the app. Just saying......
 
#51
eco5280 said:
So announce it in every thread and see how the mods react :) Love how you iFanboys are already explaining away the Android win ;)
Click to expand...
I'm not explaining an "Android win", I have no vested interest in the outcome. I'm only "explaining" an initial Android lead.

Even if the poll is only mentioned initially in an Android app thread, enough people look at all new posts that it will be seen over time by a large sample of users.

I'm am 100% certain you will not see anything like 80% Android to iOS users though. I would actually be surprised if, after sufficient time, it did not settle down to around 55-45 in favor of iOS.

I have nothing against Android phones, I just prefer to like iOS. I have quite a few apps purchased over the years and I like the phone designs, so I stay with it. As older phone get passed down the the wife and kids, it's convent to stay on the same system so all the apps work on everyone's phones with repurchasing, etc.
 
#55
I'll stay out of the OS popularity fight and just say that Tesla has over 10,000 employees and two official apps that they currently support, so they should have no problem hiring one full-time Android developer to keep feature parity with iOS which appears to have a full-time developer. Why it's a problem, I haven't a clue.

A couple weekends ago, I was desperate enough to contact Tesla complaining about the missing features and offered to be a remote developer or consultant for free (under condition of flexibility since I'm not leaving my current job) and so far only got this response: "Thank you for contacting Tesla Motors technical support regarding our Android application. We appreciate your feedback and will be sending it to our app team to hopefully have the missing features added in a future update."

I extracted the apk of the Android app and found that there are some classes for notifications, which I don't doubt have been sitting there unused for a long time due to something (I suspect mainly priorities) preventing full implementation.
I went further by decompiling it to read the notifications layout, which contains views for the charge state, car alarm, and software update. The drawer layout has the visibility of the notification option set to "gone". I removed that and recompiled to reveal what you see in the screenshots below. Unfortunately, the settings don't save after enabling them, so notifications don't work.

tesla_app_recompiled_drawer_hidelogin.png
tesla_app_recompiled_notifications_partial_on.png


The classes decompiled to Smali, which I find quite difficult to understand. If it were Java, I'd try my hand at fixing notifications myself and giving it to Tesla. I think until I understand Smali enough to edit it, any changes I make to the app would need to be limited to the XML, which has no hope of fixing notifications.

Some other things of interest that I found, mostly in strings:

  • Support for 65 languages (not including dialects)
  • A few mentions of Android Wear support
  • "Sign in with Google"
  • Google ads library included, with "Allow Ad to create a calendar event?" and "Allow Ad to store image in Picture gallery?" in strings
  • "Buy with Google" referencing Wallet
  • A string for developer sign-in: "SIGN IN TO TESLA DEV"
 
Last edited:
#56
I've sent an email to Tesla previously about the iOS/Android app disparity also. I may revisit it in a month or so.

<rant>
I personally despise iOS. Closed source, locked down, and not user or developer friendly. I've wasted hours on such debates in person. Usually after demonstrating plenty of functionality iOS lacks, superior performance from two year old android devices vs. current gen iOS devices on nearly all common tasks, and other such completely objective and quantifiable data points where iOS fails... the person on the iOS side of the debate generally just defaults to "I just like iOS better" for whatever reason. To each there own I guess. But, before I get too OT...
</rant>

Tesla has an app for Android, so this shouldn't be a problem, right? Well it wouldn't be a problem if the apps had the same feature set. It's a dead simple app, basically just a front end UI to the back end API. There is pretty much no excuse for the versions to differ in features.

Android has something like 4x the market share of iOS. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to pack more features into the iOS version vs the Android version. At the very least they should have the same functionality.

I don't think this is asking for a lot. It's not like we're asking for a Window Mobile app (< 2% market share?). lol.

In all honesty, if Tesla essentially leaves the Android app behind and focuses only on iOS for current and new features like the trip planner and other upcoming features (enable/disable valet mode) Tesla will probably eventually lose my complete recommendation as a product and company as a whole. Why? Many reasons, but an easy one is because out of everyone I know in real life that I would ever think to suggest Tesla to maybe 1% are iOS users. "Yeah get this awesome car.... but to use awesome features X, Y, and Z you'll have to get an Apple iOS device to use Tesla's mobile app." Sorry, just not going to happen. I'm anti-iOS for many reasons, and maybe I'll write up a rant later. But I'm not going to switch to Apple nonsense to get functionality that should be in the Android version of the app.
 
#57
wk057 said:
I've sent an email to Tesla previously about the iOS/Android app disparity also. I may revisit it in a month or so. ...

Android has something like 4x the market share of iOS. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to pack more features into the iOS version vs the Android version. At the very least they should have the same functionality. ...


In all honesty, if Tesla essentially leaves the Android app behind and focuses only on iOS for current and new features like the trip planner and other upcoming features (enable/disable valet mode) Tesla will probably eventually lose my complete recommendation as a product and company as a whole. ...

But I'm not going to switch to Apple nonsense to get functionality that should be in the Android version of the app.
Click to expand...

Hey, if that was your stump speech to get elected president of the Android App Users Group, that's cool, but I think you should at least become a member of the group first :) :

Tesla Android App Users - Tesla Motors Club - Enthusiasts & Owners Forum
 
#59
#60
beeeerock said:
I wonder how this one stacks up to the official Tesla app? Would be pretty sad if it met or exceeded the functionality of the Android version... ;-)

Control your Tesla Model S via your Z10 or Q10 with the Model S for BlackBerry app! | CrackBerry.com

The article is almost two years old, but the app still exists. I've installed it, just need the car to try it out.

(If it exists on BlackBerry, there should be 10 better versions for Android!)
Click to expand...

Looks like that probably just used the non-public REST API that has some potential issues nowadays along with a new authentication method.

I've considered doing up an app, but the notifications portion (the main feature missing currently) is done on iOS via push notifications through Apple...
 
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