Appreciate the suggestion. App widgets are on our roadmap already.
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We’re looking at ways to make all our ecosystem offerings (including Ather Connect) sustainable so that owners can continue to have a great experience without compromises. For new Ather owners, we are already bundling Ather Connect into the scooter purchase with the Pro Pack to give owners peace of mind and allow them to fully benefit from Ather Connect. For existing Ather owners, we’ll be moving to a paid model by the end of this month. Some of the OG Ather 450 owners might remember our older subscription plans for Ather Connect (circa 2019 or so). We’ve taken A LOT of feedback from that and worked extremely hard to improve on the previous subscription plans both in terms of value, and especially in terms of pricing.
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Why advertise these features in your event then? The list of false promises by Ather keep on stacking up and it isn’t a good look on the company and its operations.
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Software has to be stable before launching a subscription model. We are not against subscription but maps is still Unreliable and there are endless bugs in dashboard software.
Actually I feel like we are back to square-1 after new UI implementation in-terms of bugs. As after so many iterations old UI and software is almost stable and then this happened.
New UI is good but bugs are irritating. After all now no one is ready to pay for testing anymore which is the case initially (OG paid for subscriptions despite of buggy software now with the number of users and the stage at which Ather is standing no more such things). You guys have to understand that Ather is no more a startup.
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Two points on why we changed up UI and introduced wings of power:
- Avoid information overload. A rider shouldn’t have to focus on so many different things on the riding screen
- Wings of power was meant to give an easy visual reference for an optimum range of efficiency across all modes, rather than riders trying to hit one specific number. Ideally makes it easier for the rider, especially ones who might be coming from ICE world and have zero concept of efficiency or Wh or any of those terms.
We do acknowledge that we’ve done a horrible job of explaining how the wings of power works. We’re making some “how to” videos which will explain this. Once you learn to interpret it, it’s a breeze.
That being said, we will consider this feedback for future updates to see if there is a potential to show efficiency while in navigation as well.
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We were restricted on maps styling based on the APIs available to us. Our team has been actively working with our vendor to get access to the appropriate APIs to showcase the traffic layer similar to how it is on the mobile app. The good news is we are almost there. Expect an OTA update on this soon!
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We roll out all updates in a phased manner across the entire fleet, just like all software company updates. It can take anything from a few hours to a few days - the biggest factor being your network connectivity at that time. Almost all of our roll outs are completed within a week.
We do have beta programs for both scooter OTA and mobile app. You can signup for the beta program at the link below. Please note: beta updates are for testing features and may not always be stable so we’re expecting great feedback from you to help us optimise for fleet wide release.
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Yes!!! The entire suite of call controls is getting upgraded starting with the auto-reply on call decline, getting whatsapp messages on your dash as you can see on Ather Labs. So definitely stay tuned for a lot of exciting features in this area in the next few months!! Missed call notifications is in the roadmap and the team is evaluating the feasibility.
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It’s an interesting question! Internally we did a concept with a public weather information API. In general, we found the publicly available weather prediction APIs to be still far from accurate and thus lose their value. We are exploring a better way to provide weather forecast.
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Being able to have multiple profiles for a scooter is in the works. Not just the scooter name or bluetooth, we have to create separate favourites, recents, etc for the maps. Each profile may need to see ride stats for their specific rides. We will have to define controls between primary user and additional profiles like who can set optimised charging and so on. As this involves changes across multiple features in the app and dashboard, expect for it to take some time. But it is definitely being looked at.
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Will definitely be looking into this. Please do add requests like this to the feature request thread on the forum (or upvote existing requests) so our team can plan better.
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Done! Getting this fixed as soon as possible. Although considering how meticulous our designers are for everything, we can excuse the occasional slip up right 
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It’s not as simple as toggling ON or OFF the communication tech but making sure that the experience is seamless for the rider. For example, a lot of work has gone into making 4G connectivity stable and reliable.
Similarly, enabling WiFi also requires significant work on ensuring transitions between WiFi and cellular, and a lot of work on security to ensure that edge cases are covered.
In the meantime, we’re constantly working with our telecom partner to ensure robust coverage across India, if you find an area with frequently low coverage, do let us know and we’ll try to solve for it.
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Predicting battery health requires extensive modeling of battery cycles under different conditions for the entire lifecycle of a battery. It is also a time consuming exercise (as the model needs to be trained across the entire life) to make sure that the model parameters are tuned to give near accurate value of health of battery. Only recently, some of the Ather owners have crossed 50-60k kms and that gives our teams the opportunity to start fine-tuning the estimation models. We want to make sure that we are putting out a feature like this with high accuracy and that’s why taking the time to do it right.
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This is a rather big topic - so let me split it,
- Permissions for Ather app - auto reconnection should ideally work if background running permission and battery optimization permissions are given to the Ather app
- Phone models and their implementation - what we are finding recently is that different phones are calling those permissions differently which is making it difficult for us to make the process easier. We are working on simplifying this.
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Since @srivatsan.subbarayan is having some login issues at home, posting this answer on his behalf.
While we work on improving the overall experience of the UI in terms of responsiveness, we are hardware limited - both on CPU and RAM. We try to make sure that the experience of the SW on all generations is as similar as possible. To that end, we are constantly working on optimising the software to work on all generations of scooters, and it’s something we’ll continue to keep in mind for further releases as well.
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Themes and styling to make the UI fresh is something that we are considering, but it does come at a cost of CPU/RAM that we have to consider - so its a fine balance of making things look fresh but not loose out on performance that we are working on.
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Some of these questions have been answered in detail in the other posts; so would encourage you to read through the detailed answers. I will summarize those answers in this post:
- We were restricted with the styling we can have with the APIs earlier. Our team has been working with the vendor to get access to more APIs so that the traffic can be shown as it is seen on mobile app. Expect an update on this soon.
- Estimating battery health is a long process because the team needs real-life data on batteries at different stages and usage patterns to accurately estimate the health. It’s being worked upon as only recently a few of Ather customers have crossed 50K kms.
- There is a rigorous process around working on customer feedback. While in some areas we have made good progress, but I agree that we have a lot of room for improvement. We are working hard to incorporate all the feedback we have been receiving to ensure that the experience is at par with the expectations.
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- More themes - defenitely something we are considering, will have to take sometime to optimize for performance etc given our hardware limitations
- Solenoid unlock through app is doable - although as far as charging experiences are considered we are working on other features like optimized charging right now
- That is a very good suggestion - makes a note
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A widget for Ather app in our roadmap. Thanks for the suggestion!
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