How reliable is the Hondalink app for you?

I’ve had a recurring problem getting HondaLink to connect to the car. While the car is charging I can see the charging status and it updates every 15% like everyone has noticed. After a while it can’t connect to the car anymore and this can’t remotely warm up the car. It doesn’t matter if the car is still plugged in or not. Has anyone else noticed this and figured out if there is any way to fix it? Would be awfully nice to be able to warm up the car when I’m ready to leave my office in January! I’m current on the SB updates through 18-097 so that isn’t the problem.

 

Is the cell service where you work bad? The car relies on a cell signal to receive communications.

 

It’s not great, but it’s not terrible either. What’s weird is that the connection works fine while the car is charging and then stops working at some random period after the car is charged. I’ve checked periodically during the day and seen the fully charged status and the indicator that the car is still plugged in. Then the connection drops.

 

So far, bottom line is that it's not "reliable", no matter how you define it.

Updates (whether car is plugged in or not (L1)) can be as late as 3 hours to show how much it's charged.

Turning Climate On is 100% failure (base version, not Touring so I may be expecting too much), again whether car is plugged in or not.

Parking reminder Does work

 

I have a work cell phone and a personal cell phone, and I was getting consistent HondaLink trouble with the work one, but not so much with the other phone. So I did the ol' routine of deleting the data from the HondaLink app in the app manager, and that cured the problem on the work phone. There are still occasional connection problems that flare up once in a while, but in those cases I think it is the car failing to 'phone home' and needs a car restart to fix it.

Anyway, long story short - try deleting the data in the app which will probably make you log in again when you restart the app, but it may begin to work more reliably. The deleting the app data seems to be the modern equivalent of 'have you tried turning it off and on again?'...

 

Just noticed something weird about the app on my iPhone. When I look at the app itself it (today) said “cannot retrieve information”. However when the car stopped charging when the battery was 100% I got a notification that the charging was stopped. Still can’t see anything in the app, but the notifications work.

 

Yes. I get the "cannot retrieve information" occasionally. I think I always get the car stopped charging notification. Generally I have slammed Honda pretty hard on the lack of desired on-board information and ICE control we have for the Clarity. I'll cut them a little slack here since the app is free. Similar app for the Volt requires OnStar active account (after the free subscription expires). I do like being able to stop charging if you don't want to push the battery to full 100% (like if you know you are going down a big hill on the start of your drive or just don't need the full charge and want to baby the battery to help with longevity). I just stopped mine at 93% using the app. It is nice that whenever you stop the charging, you get an update of the current state of charge. It's also really handy when the Chargepoint chargers misbehave to get the car to start charging again when it stops prematurely. I've only used the climate conditioning once so far, but it was really nice when I did (car was parked in sun in summer). Anyway, the app isn't perfect, but is is really adequate for my needs.

 

Well, it is reliable in terms of what it can do, which is remote start the vehicle, schedule/start/stop charging, and alert you when it stopped charging (either because it was full, schedule or charging system problem). I've seen errors saying that it couldn't connect or retrieve the status, but even then, the start/stop/precondition always worked.

It does suck as to trying to get information on how much it charged.

 

Yes, it updates only every 15% of charge which with 120V charging could be a couple of hours. However it's pretty easy to approximate the current charge on the car when charging just knowing when the next update should occur (again on 120V it's about 2 hours, on 240V its about 25-30 min). You are roughly going to pick up 4 miles per hour on 120V and 16 miles per hour on 240V (at 25A). Just approximate where it is. The app says the charging mode (120V or 240V) and as discussed it is pretty reliable sending notification when charging stops prematurely. If you really want exact state of charge, you can always stop charging and then restart charging. This will update charging status on the app. I can live with estimating where it is. It is always good enough for me to stop charging between 90% and 95% if I really want to.

 

Maybe for a Touring, but my app cannot start my base Clarity. There is No option for it. Maybe you meant the Charging, or Climate?

 

By "start/stop", su_A_ve meant start and stop Charging, and "precondition" meant turn on the Climate heating or cooling.

 

I read that part. I think you missed the part where she said

which is what I was questioning. I get the rest, lol

 

What would be the difference between remote start and climate start even if they were individually offered on the app? On the Volt, I think it called it remote start (don't think it had a climate start option), but you still couldn't drive the car without getting in it and pushing the start button from what I remember. So in effect it just turned on the heat/AC and maybe the radio, but there's not anybody in the car to listen to it, so it's like the proverbial tree falling in the woods...
To help maybe clear this up, I have the touring package and have no remote start option, just start/stop on charging and climate start.

 

I can’t remotely turn on the climate feature when I get the cannot retrieve message.

 

I guess I am lucky with the cannot retrieve incidence rate. It's only happened to me 3 or 4 times over 5 months and I assumed it was just when my phone wasn't in an area where it had data reception.

 

The HondaLink app seems to be getting better lately. I like to use the Find My Car feature (which only works if the car is stationary) to see where my wife is. Lately it's been returning the information on the map much quicker than before.

I find the other readings reflect what the car shows (Total range, EV, HV, etc.) all work rather well.

When I first got the car I wasn't sure if the HondaLink app would be useful because it rarely worked. Now it seems to work 95% of the time.

 

I installed the HondaLink last night after waiting for the best part of a week after taking delivery to make sure my info was uploaded to Honda. It immediately informed me that charging was finished. This morning, I tried the preconditioning heating and set the timer for 10 minutes before I needed to leave. When I got to the car, it was a sauna. The windows were steamed up and it was way warmer than the 68F that I had left the settings on. Five minutes warm up would have been plenty. This evening I tried it again before I went out to put it in the garage to charge. It worked just fine.

Mine is a base model.

 

It doesn't care what your settings are. Read the PDF in this post by @KentuckyKen.

 

Next up from HondaLink: “Find out what the wife is doing”

 

I have the same issue. I haven't really been using the app for long enough to form a reliable opinion, but I am not impressed. The functions that require connecting for information from the car work about 50% of the time, which essentially makes them useless since Murphy's Law dictates that they will work fine when you don't particularly need them but not work when you want to warm the car up before leaving.

I don't know which cellular vendor it is using so I can't deduce how strong the cellular signal is in the garage. I don't have any issues using my phone, but if Honda picked a different provider that might be the issue.