alt Hacker NewsGerman companies, especially old school industrial ones like VW, have a very hard time understanding open platforms. The view everything through the lense of liability and compliance first. Their thinking is that if someone runs their app on a custom ROM and uses that to manipulate the app in any way, and that causes some extremely hypothetical damage, that they might be held liable for not having prevented this situation.
Obviously, the chances of that are virtually zero. But they'd rather make their product worse than assume with any kind of risk, even if it is virtually zero. That is simply the way in which German enterprises operate.
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I wonder if they would be ok with letting users sign a waiver to gain unrestricted API access.
VW didn’t seem too concerned with compliance when they were rigging their pollution tests.
If I had to guess it’s liability concerns around the app-based remote unlock and parking + R155 and CRA. A lot of european companies have moved to require attestation in their apps, likely spurred on by the CRA.
Yeah sure, the company behind Dieselgate and single handedly destroyed the diesel market is worried about compliance? Give me a break.
If they have concerns about the security of their app on some platform, they have the choice to either put "security" into the app, or to trust the platform vendor to provide the security. The correct solution is the first way. Deferring trust to the platform provider is the lazy way.
If their APIs are done correctly, they shouldn't be afraid to expose them.