Around mid-year 2018 NIU finally started to release a much better version of the App than the one before… which – and we all agreed on this – was a piece of crap (Post from 2017). But now we have a new NIU app, we’re at roughly version 3.4.6 and things are getting better and better.

The new NIU App

This new version, let’s call it V3 for short -here’s the official press release – does indeed many things better than the previous one – most important, it’s much more stable.

There are several “pages” you can swipe through and they actually have some useful information in them, i.e. the main page correctly reports your parking position, and finally the stats are correct, too.  The 2nd “Service” page shows the closest dealer to your current position and the 3rd page provides a working OTA update functionality for your scooters ECU…

The setup woes

Still, there are some things troubling (new) users – these didn’t change since the previous version and are more or less the dealers “fault” not properly informing their customers.

• Many dealers actually don’t tell their customers that activating their sim card can take some time, the process is automatic now, but still can take some hours before the status will show online. Meaning the most enthusiastic customers will go crazy if the App doesn’t work instantly. So have patience, young padawan.
• Registering with you mobile phone number: still owners enter their phone numbers the wrong way (no country code, keeping the zero, spaces, etc) so that the text-message will never arrive
• Of course using the wrong password too many times will get you locked out.

And now for the cool news…

Yes, it’s true: NIU is listening! Right here. Whatever feature you’re missing in the App, things that drive you crazy… bring it on! Put it in the comments or in the corresponding forum thread and some nice NIU employees will read them – promised!
You chance to de-crap the App even further – and if you don’t, you may be silent forever 😉

Here are my 2 cents to give you a head-start:

• Add an error-code decoder (e.g. enter “30” and get a useful description and optimally a way to fix it)
• Make it faster – sometimes it takes a while to load all images & data. Just use more AWS instances in international locations 😉