Ford App Aggressively Promoting Phone Key

[Mark-E Mark]

Is there someone else in the house you trust to make their phone a key, assuming they rarely go near the car? Or do you have an old phone that could be a key and left in a drawer.

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[Bad Dolphin]

Is PAAK working now? A problem has existed for at least two months. I tried to re-enable it last week without success.

Been working for us with all three iPhones (up to and thru latest iOS 18 update this week) since we bought the car new in April (25 GT).

Also, referring to another post here, I agree-from what you Android users are saying, the Ford seems to be friendlier to iPhones.

We do NOT leave our Ford App open and running. It therefore does not suck phone battery, and still functions well as PAAK.

Occasionally it falters, and when I check it's because my phone has gone to sleep. All I have to do is press any button to awaken it (I do not have to unlock it) and PAAK is good again.

But our annoyance is the new prompt that "PAAK works better with app open" that now pops up every time we exit the app. (To be fair, Tesla app did that, too...)

 

[DonM]

I have an iPhone 12 and I stopped using PAAK because it didn't work sometimes. More recently I tried it again and it looks like it works, but only when I wake up the phone first (i.e., pull it out and make it show something on its screen). Is that 100% reliable, that the iPhone just needs to be awake? I'm reluctant to try it because the consequences of failure are not great.

 

[ChrisO]

Android and iPhone definitely do things differently as far as running an App in the background and sleeping and all of that.

I suspect that for Android if I had "woke up" my phone ever time even "optimize for use" would have worked fine. But I leave my phone in my pocket, I don't pull it out to get into the car. As far as power drain is concerned even with "always on" that doesn't mean it is drawing a lot of power. It doesn't really have to do much work. When I'm using it with Android Auto that can draw the power quite a bit, but that has nothing to do with PAAK. For PAAK I just checked and it has used less than 1% today.

I should have mentioned something else. I noticed that I had ignored a warning about the battery setting when setting up PAAK before in the Ford App. That is what lead me to fix it this time around.

 

[Bad Dolphin]

I have an iPhone 12 and I stopped using PAAK because it didn't work sometimes. More recently I tried it again and it looks like it works, but only when I wake up the phone first (i.e., pull it out and make it show something on its screen). Is that 100% reliable, that the iPhone just needs to be awake? I'm reluctant to try it because the consequences of failure are not great.

Yes.

 

[Father Of Dragon]

Neither my iPhone 13 Pro or my iPhone 16 Pro need to be awake for PAAK to work (usually they are in my pocket). Note that newer iOS versions let you control background processes for apps... I would think by default the Ford app would be allowed, but if it's not working for you, I would recommend checking those settings.

 

[ChasingCoral]

(I’ve tried that feature, it’s cool, but I dislike that my car wakes up every time I walk by it in the garage, which is often. Sticking with just a fob negates this issue.)

You can turn off PaaK by closing the app on the phone. That will solve the walking past the garage issue.

Then you can activate PaaK again later by opening the app.

 

[utrph77004]

Set it up, turn off background app refresh, turn off location services, and kill the app in the background after you launch it and you will never have to worry about it waking the car up whenever you walk past it. Then you have the option to use PAAK in the future if desired and the reminder will go away permanently.

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