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In the end, the KIA car company made its cars into subscription models, I really hate this because in the end the car we buy with our own money doesn't feel like it belongs to us. Should we finally buy an old school car ? so as not to be affected by this subscription models or is there a way to crack the software installed in it ?
You realize that maintaining a server that would allow that costs pennies?
You wouldn't pay $150 for a lollipop, but somehow people think this is ok.
This problem exists exactly because of people like you, thinking it's OK to pay for the features you already paid for.
I'm betting they're paying more than the servers per car for the cellular connectivity.
It's not what we pay obviously. But it's not free either.
The traffic and compute for this kind of application is very minimal, a cheap server can hold thousands and thousands of users.
It's the cellular connectivity that costs a lot, difficult to imagine that would be less than 50 cents a month
They could be paying licensing per user for some third party solution that meets the security requirements of stuff like remote unlocking. (Yeah, they also could do it themselves, at the cost of hiring a couple security experts, and the scale should make it pretty cheap per car, but a lot of the times companies like to hire it out so they have someone to point to if there are flaws.)
They could also just not care and do a shitty job, but doing the software part correctly isn't free either. But yeah, cellular with how little they use it and economies of scale isn't going to be a massive outlay, but it's something that makes some sense to have behind a paid service. Right now it's not a huge cost, but down the road, if they're paying for 20 years of cars worth of connectivity when most of them aren't used, it could add up to meaningful expenses that are pointless.
low-bandwidth data plans in bulk are pretty cheap. it's what many atms, vending machines, redbox and similar, etc., along with sensors and gauges, and what-not for a variety of applications, use.
over the expected lifespan of a car, it would cost the manufactures less than they charge for a set of floor mats.
Maintaining the infrastructure needed for all the shite that modern cars are packed with, including the person cost of maintenance is not "pennies". You don't just spin up a EC2 instance and call it a day. You need infrastructure across multiple countries, service level agreements, people on-call to handle issues, account management with third-party downstream services, etc.
With that being said, you've already paid. You paid for the car, which costs an obscene amount already. If you own the car, you don't need a separate payment for the software.
All of these functionalities can be provided by a simple WebSocket + REST server. The car connects to the WebSocket, and you can access these functionalities from your phone either with WebSockets or regular HTTP requests.
Cheapest servers with backend written in JS can easily handle thousands of WebSocket connections, and written in Go tens of thousands WebSocket connections. They would not ever need like over 100 of these servers GLOBALLY, which would cost them around $3000 monthly.
That's the price of 60 subscriptions, which is freaking ridiculous.
Or “for free” as in paid for by your data and the unskippable targeted ads you wil get on your infotainment system. I’m sure in the future some cheap car brand will blast commercials trough your speaker system to pay for all the free services
The KIA app has three trackers in it. (Can't scan the latest version, however) Not exactly a lot by contemporary standards, but more than many. Two of my banking apps have 7. One weather app has 10. The apps I respect have none or only a single tracker, and only for crashlytics, and still optional.
Thanks for linking to the tracker site, I've been meaning to find more ways to audit the amount of trackers in my apps for a while now.
Happy to help