Hello Jdeck and everyone in this thread,
I am a new Tesla owner since Sept. I looked around a bit at 3rd party apps, and decided that TeslaFi was a much better idea. I still have IOS apps “Remote S” and “Stats for Tesla”, both very pretty, but am considering disabling both in favor of official Tesla app and TeslaFi only.
Main reason: I like that all of the access to my Tesla account and the car, beyond that from the Tesla-supported mobile app, is coming from a website and not another mobile phone app. This eliminates issues of varying connectivity available to the phone as I go about my daily activities. It also means I can use multiple phones, tables, and computers to check on my car statistics, without creating additional traffic. I tend to add IOS apps automatically on all my devices including tablets, and was surprised when this generated extra traffic to Tesla servers and/or the car. I decided that was a bad idea and restricted all 3rd party apps to my mobile phone.
REQUEST FOR COMMENTS: I am not completely clear on the nature of traffic from 3rd party apps, how much of that traffic is going only to the Tesla servers, how much of that traffic to the Tesla servers results in a conversation with the car, and whether any of the traffic from 3rd party apps is going direct to the car.
My SWAG is that 100% of traffic from 3rd party mobile phone apps is going first to Tesla servers, and that any extra communication with the car caused by these 3rd party apps is caused by the severs responsibility to these apps by querying the car. But I am not entirely sure. Perhaps some of the traffic uses bluetooth or wifi to contact the car directly?
I have heard the claim from some 3rd party app developers that their app causes less vampire drain than TeslaFi. I am skeptical about this claim, but I understand if you don’t use TeslaFi “sleep mode” and your 3rd party app implements something similar by default, there certainly could be a difference. I have not enabled sleep mode yet because the car is always plugged into my home charger when not out and about, and I haven’t yet had to leave the car at an airport or hotel parking for long periods of inactivity.
Anyway, sorry if this has all been covered somewhere in the 80+ pages of postings in this thread over the past 2 years.
Keep up the good work!