My smart app not working just when need it

MG4London

MG4London

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london
Driving
MG4 SE SR
I really want to preheat my car ten mins before I do the school run, but the app is so unreliable these days

It just says the remote control option failed please try again later

Would this be covered in the warranty?
 
When it’s not working for me, I go out to the car, unlock it, lean on the driver’s seat to power it up, set the temp to 29°C and go back inside. It can’t be driven away without the key but warms up & isn’t limited by the 10 min app pre heat.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
MartinSEsr said:
When it’s not working for me, I go out to the car, unlock it, lean on the driver’s seat to power it up, set the temp to 29 and go back inside. It can’t be driven away without the key but warms up & isn’t limited by the 10 min app pre heat.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a plan, the only downside is you have to leave the car unlocked. 😉
I would actually put the front and rear demisters on if I did that, it warms up quicker with those on.
 
MG4London said:
I really want to preheat my car ten mins before I do the school run, but the app is so unreliable these days

It just says the remote control option failed please try again later

Would this be covered in the warranty?
Click to expand...

This often happened for me with the old version of the app too.

Swipe down to refresh, it can take a few goes. When it eventually gets linked up and shows the current charge, the remote controls will work too.

... except when MG's servers are down, and then it'll just stay broken until they fix it.

No, this isn't very satisfactory, but there it is.
 
I don't want to jinx anything but personally I've found the latest version of iSmart very reliable and I've been able to send the preheat instruction to the car without any problems. When you open the app first you need to let it try to scan as it does, even if this fails I can still use the "Air Conditioner" link to send to the car.
 
It sounds very much as if the car has gone to sleep. I had previously thought that it would stay awake for 24 hours, but earlier this week I got this "remote control function failed" message repeatedly when the car had been used the previous day. I went into the room in the house that is through the wall from the garage and pressed the unlock button on the key fob. Immediately it all started working again.

It was -5C here this afternoon when I left for home and I was damn glad of the pre-heat facility.
 
The preheat wouldn't work for me earlier this evening (around 5.30pm, even after doing the unlock/lock routine) even though the car scanned OK. However it worked fine around 8pm. 🤷‍♂️
 
It failed for me this morning too. Saying that, since the app has updated it rarely works now. I didn't have any problems before the app update with pre-warming. Also, my car failed on me at traffic lights this morning saying I needed to put my seat belt on before driving off. Tried few times but had to get out (on the motorway slip road) lock it and unlock to get back in and it worked. It's been a 👎 car day!
 
I had this problem last week when the app said the remote-control option failed, please try again later.
I tried resetting the app etc. but nothing worked.
I resolved it by disconnecting the 12v battery for a minute and connecting it back up.
This then as it was booting up produced a lot of error messages on the driver screen as well as asking me to put the driver window down and up again.
After it went through its boot-up procedure, everything went back to normal.
I tried the smart app, and everything worked fine.
 
Rolfe said:
Did you try unlocking and re-locking the car before you tried disconnecting the battery? That often does the trick.
Click to expand...
I tried that. I even checked the mobile signals in the area, but they were fine.
What made me come to my decision removing the battery was that all was working OK, I checked the battery status that night with the app, then in the morning it had stopped working.
My conclusion was that the on board computer had lost its connection to the outside world. So the obvious choice was to remove the battery and hope it would run through it's scripts and connect again.
(If your PC stops connecting to the WiFi you reboot it and normally it will connect again.)
 
Since updating to the new version its very temperamental showing me the charging status on the app. For example, its charging now to 80%, I can open the app and it scans the car ok. But when I go on the battery tab to check how the charging is going, it just hangs and says remote control fail. The servers must be ok and its connecting to the car, otherwise it wouldn't scan. A little frustrating, as I can't see now if the charging is finished on the app, I have to go and look out of the window to see if the lights have gone off green.
 

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