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Nissan's LEAF® App Doesn't Have a Home Screen Widget So I Made My Own for Free

·1153 words·6 mins·
Table of Contents

Nissan’s App
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Nissan’s official NissanConnect® EV & Services iPhone app:

lets you manage the unique features of your LEAF like charging the battery, adjusting climate controls and checking the battery status, all from your mobile device

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like for my car:

Screenshot of Nissan LEAF iPhone app showing vehicle information

The app is…fine. Here is one representative review from the Apple App Store:

On 10/11/2023 SugimotoKoitsu reviewed the app: “Slow communication with the car: This app is pretty limited in what it does, the most useful to me being setting the cabin temperature in winter and checking charging status at work so I don’t hog one of the only two level 2 chargers at work all day. I like to take my 2023 Leaf SV+ off the charger as it nears 100%. But the app is very slow to update the status of the battery. I guess Nissan is polling the car through its cellular connection or a satellite connection, because I can’t log the car into the WiFi network at work. So maybe those methods are time consuming but it takes about five minutes to update the battery status, which is very annoying. It seems like there’s room for improvement in efficiency.”

My main issue with the app is that it lacks a home screen widget I could use to quickly check my car’s battery status, unlike apps for other electric car brands like Rivian, Ford, and Lucid.

Third-Party Apps
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Meanwhile, others have developed their own Nissan LEAF apps with a custom user interface and additional features (some with a home screen widget!):

Unfortunately, I understand that none of these apps are still available to use where I live in North America. 😞

The developer of “My Leaf” shared his frustration in a blog post, explaining how Nissan’s deliberate changes to their North American API forced him to discontinue support for users in the region:

I simply won’t support it any longer because of Nissan of North America’s persistant work on blocking third party clients. I continued to try and support the API during the last 12 months. Playing cat and mouse with Nissan. I simply don’t have the time and honestly the drive to continue when I know Nissan are consistently trying to break third party clients on purpose. It’s a sad and foolishness reality indeed.

Project Goals
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Nevertheless, I decided to take on the challenge of developing an iPhone home screen widget that could show me the battery charge status of my Nissan LEAF car.

I added one more constraint to the project: no spending money. I believe Nissan’s app should already provide a home screen widget, so it didn’t seem fair to have to spend any money on this project. However, using tools/devices I already had access to was fair game.

Notably, that ruled out using something like Sidecar which appears to provide a home screen widget. I think it looks very slick, but it requires the purchase of a wireless On-board Diagnostics (OBD) scanner plus a $6.99 USD/month subscription. 😓

It also ruled out using the popular LeafSpyPro app which similarly requires the purchase of a wireless OBD scanner and costs $19.99 USD. To my knowledge, it doesn’t provide a home screen widget itself, but I think you could probably develop one using its data syncing feature.

Results
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I am happy to report I was successful and spent no money! Here is a screenshot of the widget:

Screenshot of Nissan LEAF widget on phone home screen displaying battery state of charge, available range, plugged-in status, cabin temperature range, estimated charge time, and date/time last refreshed

And if you tap the widget, it opens the NissanConnect app. You’ll notice in the following video that there are a few extra non-ideal screen transitions (more on that below), but hey, you get what you pay for!

How it Works
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To reduce the risk of any API-breaking changes, I’m just using the official NissanConnect app without any modifications:

  1. I created a GitHub repo containing a GitHub Action that:
  2. I created a separate GitHub repo containing a GitHub Actions workflow scheduled to run a job multiple times throughout the day that:
  3. I created an Apple Shortcut on my iPhone named OpenNissanConnect that opens the NissanConnect app: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fd139fa01719483a89fcbde391435ff7 Apple shortcut configuration showing that it opens the NissanConnect EV & Services app and then stops and outputs nothing"
  4. I created a free IFTTT applet that triggers on the email sent by the workflow from (2) and displays the body of the email within a “Notification Widget” on my iPhone’s home screen IFTTT configuration showing the “If” condition is “Send IFTTT an email tagged” and the “Then” action is “Send a rich notification to the IFTTT mobile widget”

IFTTT configuration for the “Then” action, the Message is set to the Body of the email received, the title is set to “Nissan LEAF® 🍃”, and the Link URL is set to a TinyURL (described below). The optional Image URL field is left blank. The Link URL field contains a TinyURL that redirects to shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=OpenNissanConnect which uses the Shortcuts URL scheme to run the Apple Shortcut from (3). I did this because IFTTT seems to check that the Link URL you provide actually resolves to a valid web URL; otherwise, the IFTTT website just opens and displays an error when you tap on the widget.

The NissanConnect app developers could definitely make changes that would break how this widget works, but those changes would by definition probably negatively affect regular human users too which I hope they would want to avoid.

Future Work
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My original plan was to run an Android emulator on the GitHub Actions runner in the cloud so I wouldn’t need to maintain my own Android device, and that almost works (in fact, it does work on my M3 Apple Silicon macOS laptop using an arm Android emulator), but it seems like the NissanConnect app (or maybe the server it connects to) may detect when x86_64 Android is being used and then refuse to sign in. Or at least, I always saw the following error when I tried both in the cloud and on an old x86_64 laptop I had:

Screenshot of Nissan Connect app sign in window with “< html > < head > < title > Error</title > </ head > < body > Unauthorized</body> </ html >” error pop-up

And unfortunately, at the time of writing, I understand:

  1. a cloud VM environment must support nested virtualization in order to run an Android emulator with hardware acceleration
  2. the only macOS arm runners GitHub provides are M1 and M2 machines, but nested virtualization is only available on M3 and later
  3. the only other arm runner GitHub supports is a Linux arm64 runner whose hardware does not support nested virtualization

Luckily, the NissanConnect app has a “demo mode” that does not require signing into an account to use, so I was able to run an Android emulator in the cloud as part of the automated continuous integration testing for the GitHub Action.

Maybe if GitHub Actions adds support for M3 Apple Silicon runners in the future, then I might be able to switch to running all of this in the cloud for free… 🤞

…or I might trade in my Nissan LEAF and get a different electric car with a better app experience before that happens. 😅