Show HN: Nissan's Leaf app doesn't have a home screen widget so I made my own

Great work! I love commitment to make it at no cost as @liamwire mentioned. Still not sure why on Earth car manufacturers would not just release APIs open to all owners (basically issue API key based on VIN) and let them use it. For developers to build apps that will only require API key to be entered would be win/win for everyone....

That's pretty cool! It's extremely frustrating that they go through so much effort to block third party apps, but the solution of just downloading and emulating the android app is simoultaneously very clever and very straightforward. A nice reminder not to overthink simple things. Cheers on a project well done!

I love the commitment to getting this to work at no cost, on principle. Many of my favourite personal projects have followed similar paths, and have often been fun challenges for that reason alone. Great article, thanks for sharing.

Does anyone else miss the functionality of the Android WhatsApp widget [1] on iOS? Being able to read messages without sending read receipts via the widget is a great feature. The iOS notification &#x27;peek&#x27; is a clumsy substitute.<p>Is this a fundamental limitation of iOS widgets&#x2F;APIs, or just something WhatsApp hasn&#x27;t implemented? Curious if others have found better ways to handle this on iPhone.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomsguide.com&#x2F;how-to&#x2F;how-to-use-the-WhatsApp-widget-on-Android" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomsguide.com&#x2F;how-to&#x2F;how-to-use-the-WhatsApp-wid...</a>

If you&#x27;re running Home Assistant and your LEAF is from before 2019, you may be able to replace the scraping part with the Nissan Leaf integration <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;integrations&#x2F;nissan_leaf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;integrations&#x2F;nissan_leaf&#x2F;</a>. Their iOS app also has support for custom widgets <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;companion.home-assistant.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;integrations&#x2F;ios-widgets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;companion.home-assistant.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;integrations&#x2F;ios-wi...</a> which might suffice for what you&#x27;re trying to achieve.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate that newer cars are not supported.

Just like OBD, I think api access to data like this should be open to the car user. If the manufacturer is taking the data ( as they do with my renault zoe) then it should be available to the end user at a standard API which is available across all manufacturers, so if you change car you can just point your setup at a new endpoint with new credentials and all the endpoints and responses are standard, just like OBD2 is<p>(yes I know manufacturer tools go deeper but that&#x27;s another issue)

I wish that US car manufacturers would finally realize that they&#x27;re software companies with a hardware device, and pivot accordingly.<p>The differentiating factor between car models is not the hardware in the world of EVs. It&#x27;s the software. And right now, if you aren&#x27;t either on Tesla, Rivian, or Polestar the software experience is horrific.

I had the same situation with my Polestar app up until recently. My solution was perhaps fewer moving parts? Worked well for nearly a year before I didn’t need it anymore.<p>-my backup phone connected to my NAS, running a signed in polestar app - a homebridge plugin that called a shell script that used adb to unlock the phone, open the app, grab the screen contents and parse it.<p>Boom, lock and battery status in homebridge and access to dozens of other tools for creating widgets and shortcuts.

Cool! I like that it just works ™ and is a lot more resilient to the hostile first party than other approaches.<p>How often does the scraping of the app running on the RaspPi run and how much is the lag between that job running and the data appearing on your phone?

Oh hey that&#x27;s my startup&#x27;s app, Sidecar, mentioned! Cool to see :D

I love the modern GitHub Actions composition process the project uses<p>I&#x27;ve seen Actions that create a usable Arch etc repos where other software that has been build can be listed<p>What&#x27;s the most creative set-up using a number of Actions that anyone has seen? On GitHub or elsewhere<p>P.S. Could that computational paradigm somehow be extended to a Yahoo! Pipes form of visual [data]flow? For some kind of personal orchestrations

I wonder if the OBD alternatives mentioned in the article actually work? I&#x27;d imagine that they wake up the entire CAN bus frequently, quickly draining the cars 12V battery?

Ford will flat out lock your account so even the official app won’t work for you if they notice you using a 3rd party app.

What a persistence by the author, but why would Nissan make this so hard?

Had a 2017 LEAF, and could never get that app working.<p>Like once in a while it would show correct status, or sometimes it would start heating.<p>But mostly it just lied. Like I could stand next to the car, issue the heating command, wait a minute, force it to check the car&#x27;s status and it would tell me the car was heating while nothing had changed with the car.<p>So yea, gave up on the app, didn&#x27;t use it the last years I owned it.<p>That said, enjoyed the writeup, looks like a nice project and as a bonus I learned about some new tools.

Nobody wants to hear it in 2025 but this is one of the reasons Tesla is still a much better experience than most of the legacy car manufacturers. Car People like to think of apps as a weird Tech People affectation, but in actual day-to-day usage, they&#x27;re invaluable.

I&#x27;m not a car person, but as an Ubuntu Touch user I have ran into issues with bike share providers who only allow renting a bike through an app which is only available for Android or iOs. I take umbrage at that and liken it to cars: imagine if you could only unlock your car with an Android phone or an iPhone. If your phone were to malfunction or got stolen or whatever you wouldn&#x27;t be able to get into your car.<p>Now, as not a car person I don&#x27;t know if there are cars like that, but seeing:<p>&gt; <i>it seems like the NissanConnect app [...] may detect when</i> x86_64 <i>Android is being used and then refuse to sign in.</i><p>Imagine having a ZenPhone 2, downloading an app to manage your car and it refusing to work. I&#x27;d go ape.