I have tried to enter my VIN into the new app several times in the past couple days--hoping to catch my MINI while it was 'on' at the factory or while being checked out or loaded. It gave an error message every time. Now, at the Southampton port for the second day, it accepted my VIN, asked if I was the primary driver, and sent a confirmation code to my MINI! Too bad I have no way of remotely retrieving that code.
Even better, it populated the VIN to the old app, and the old app tells you it is a 6 digit code consisting of 0-9 and lets you try as many six digit numbers as you want without re-setting. I tried 30 so far on the old app and it keeps asking for more. So, do I want ask my MIT grad to create an IOS program capable of generating all 999,999 possible codes in 3 hours? Probably... but not today.
Exactly what my daughter said: Bad dad! No. She suspects that the app is very forgiving for the initialization, and then gets tougher, requiring the code to be reset after a few failed attempts.
Generating the codes is not the issues - you just need a counter (by the way, there are 1,000,000 codes, not 999,999 because 000000 is presumably a valid code). The trick is getting that app to communicate with the mini app and put the value into that field and hit send.
To enter the VIN for the first time in the IOS app the car has to be ON. I was surprised that it auto-populated the VIN to the old IOS app.