PaaK and Android Personal Update

[imstriker]

I wanted to share how my personal experiences with PaaK have changed. I believe I have almost settled into a routine that might help someone. For techie and family reasons, I have been determined to use PaaK since day one exclusively. It has not been a pleasant process, but I have stuck with it and not brought a keyfob with me. That usually ended up meaning a lot of using backup codes, but recently that has changed. So, here is my current process after FordPass 3.24.0...

- Change location permission to all the time. Between this and 3.24.0 my chance of success each time has gone up considerably.
- Set FordPass to background battery restricted (thanks again to this forum). Yes, this has implications. However without it my Pixel 5 would die by 2-4pm every day.

- When unlocking car, pull out FordPass as I walk to it and unlock on app. Without background usage, this is necessary to unlock (without PIN) and to start the connection process.
- When in car, usually wait about 5-10 seconds before app changes to connected and start.

I give up unlock as I walk up and it is definitely not as convenient as a simple walk up FOB, but it is working. So far I have not had to use a backup code since going to this method. That is a huge improvement as I would have previously been at using a code 60% of the time. Hopefully Ford can find a middle ground on the battery usage issue and then allow background battery usage again. I have not been to the dealer to get the PaaK fix yet. I think I may just wait it out now since this seems reliable so far.

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[macchiaz-o]

Good tips.

Yeah I hope they are working to use geofencing as a way to address part of this issue. If I'm walking further away from the car's known location, the rate at which the phone tries to reconnect to the vehicle can be slowed down quite a bit, then sped back up as I walk close enough to it.

Or if power levels at the car allow it, then the car can be the one constantly trying to connect to authorized phones instead of doing it the other day around. Reasonably, it could try to connect to phone keys for a few days over BLE before giving up and switching to a much less frequent reconnect interval. The car wouldn't be able to make a geofencing optimization, but instead it could back off after awhile (days) and wait for one of its door sensors to activate before trying to reconnect again.