On Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 2024, at 7:05:19 AM Pacific Time, I received the following email from Enel X Way North America:
TLDR:
We're shutting down the company. Also, no more customer support for you, and the app will stop working too. The charger will still charge your car, but good luck configuring it. So long, and thanks for all the money.
What awful people. People bought the charger on the basis that it was app-configurable. You could remotely schedule it or change the charging current. Soon, you'll be able to do none of that. Electrek claims that the app will shut off in 9 days, but does not provide an official source for where they got that number.
"Why would you ever need to remotely change your charging current or schedule?" you may ask. People with 100A circuits may want to reduce their charging rate before they start a heavy appliance, like a washing machine. For others, the charger connects to their local utility by giving them a discount on their electric rates, so long as the utility can increase or decrease charging during peak periods. All of that out the window in 9 days.
If you have your charger set on a schedule, does it stay stuck like that forever if you don't disable that in this small window? No clue, but this only matters if you managed to set these settings beforehand regardless. The app is, and this is an understatement, garbage. Every time you start up, it asks you what country you're in. Even if you've told it to save the setting. Why it needs this? I do not know.
This, by the way, is AFTER it asks for your current GPS location. No, the "Use my location" button doesn't work. Other times, it will give me a full-screen error message that the session expired. As if I need to know that, instead of just sending me to the login screen.
Why it asks for the location, I have no idea. It already knows the address of the charger... for some reason.
Also, it can't seem to understand apostrophes. I have my my car named as "(myName)'s Car" in the app, and it does whatever the hell this is.
It's 2024, how did you manage to mess up text? And simple text, at that!
It's a garbage app, but at the very least it works like 75% of the time. That's infinitely better than the 0% of the time it's going to work in 9 days. The app is also somehow worse than their old app, JuiceNet (Archived), which had a HomeAssistant integration. The new app migration left those users high and dry, and this latest development leaves everyone, not just HomeAssistant power users, in the dust.
Let's compare to a portable charger I bought earlier this year:
It didn't have 2.3 stars at the time, and I personally have had no issues with it. This thing is dumber than a bag of rocks, and that's just the way I like it. I can adjust the current rating, and the amount of time to wait before charging begins. In hours, not a specific time, because it doesn't even have an RTC. And you know what? It charges just as fast as that $689 JuiceNet thing, and it'll still work even when the company goes under because it doesn't need some proprietary server to stay functional.
Personally, this makes me never want to buy any smart product ever again, even if it has a HomeAssistant integration, since apparently even that can get taken away from you. 🙄
The Enel X Way app has been archived to the Internet Archive.