The Range screen has been fixed and needs some explanation. In essence it compares the available range calculated by the car to three different ranges:

  • The first number is a range based on the current energy content of the battery and the worst consumption;
  • The second number is the same, based on average consumption. One would expect this to be the same as the car reported range, but it isn’t;
  • The thirst number is the same but using the best consumption.

The consumption numbers are calculated by the car. The second number can made a bit worse using the slider to adjust for sporty driving. In my case, leaving it at -10% seems to be about right.

CanZE has no “phone home” capabilities, but Google acquires quite a bit of data and I thought it would be fun to give you a bit of an insight at what we’re up against.

  • We are seeing a fairly consistent growth rate of 40% per year. The metric we use is “Installed on devices that have been online in the last 30 days”. As I write this in early March we’re seeing a total of roughly 4400 active installs.
  • Not surprisingly more than half of the installs are in Germany, France and the UK.
  • The top 6 devices are all Samsungs and a quick addition of all Samsung branded devices added up to over 1300.
  • Of the operators what was interesting to see is that about 20% have no operator listed. I interpreted that as devices having a second life without SIM card for basically CanZE only. I like that. Although those would be slow to update and probably miss out on the news bar.
  • Android versions: about 2700 are on Android 7 or higher, but believe it or not, 60 are on Android 4 and just over 300 on 5.

For health statistics we get quite detailed aggregated reports on crashes and hangs. The last couple of weeks you have seen quite bunch of new releases and that is because we really stepped up our efforts to root out as many as possible and as soon as we see them. To give some sort of idea, in the last 7 days, and filtering out devices that have not been updated for months we’ve seen:

  • One non responsive screen
  • Eight different clusters of crashes, 6 of which were reported only once.
  • The two were basically the same and accounted for 13 actual crashes. It is a silly bug in the Tyres screen.

As you can imagine it is that last problem we try to quickly focus on and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is already fixed in the development branch and it will be fixed in the next release. And so are 3 of the single instance ones. For those interested, you can always check out what is in the pipeline here.

When we release about 35% of the active devices are updated within a day, and 70% within a week. But also note that if we assume the three last releases to be “current”, about 18% is not in that bracket after a week. A year after a release is superseded we still see about 2% of that release on active devices. And that is why we need to filter out some of the crashes.

Unfortunately we can’t see how much CanZE is actually used*) so it’s not easy to put those in perspective, but then again, less than 3 crashes per day on a 4000 installed base is too much but not crazy.

*) No, the new news bar does not tell us that. It fetches the news bar from github and we don’t have statistics about it’s usage.

As much as we like to cover the full ZE spectrum of the Renault brand, the time has come to end support for the Fluence ZE and Kangoo ZE. We have no access to these cars, there are no developers that do and there are active communities and apps for them. FluenceSpy by Alexandre Moleiro is one. Frankly, we never were able to do a good job there and we don’t want to promise more than we can deliver with at least some quality. It’s hard enough to maintain CanZE for the 90 and 110 models without free access to them.

The planning for deprecation is as follows

  • March 2019: this announcement
  • May 2019: message in the news bar in CanZE
  • July 2019: removal of specific code from the App

Of course you can still try to use CanZE in said models but some functions will not work properly anymore and we won’t accept any bug reports or requests that are specific for the models.

On the less sad side of things, a new Twizy owner has taken on the challenge to give the Twizy support a good crank. Stay tuned for news in that department.

The second print (blue) is finally usable, but I refined it to make it fit more neatly. The third print (orange) is the last one I did today and the components of my previous prototype fit perfectly.

The print may not look perfect, but hey, is quite a step above the “duck tape version”, isn’t it?

As the original case doesn’t fit the needs and can’t be easily modified to do so, I just decided to create a new one. 3h of printing to go … let’s wait and see ๐Ÿ˜‰