Category: FAQ

ezOBD is designed to work with any WiFi OBDII dongle including the cheap ones.
We tested several of the ones that are less than $20 and could not find operational issues.
Many of those claim to use the authentic ELM327 device but do not.
One way to tell is that those particular ones say ELM327 version 1.5 but
the authentic ELM327 does not have a version 1.5.
Another thing to watch out for is the CD that comes with some of those cheap ones.
For one that we ordered, we found viruses on the CD but the CD is not necessary
for the dongle to work and the odb scanner worked fine with ezOBD.

Until you buy a WiFi OBDII port dongle, the only way to run ezOBD
is to download and use a simulator that is of no use except to see how ezOBD works.    Without the dongle, you will see a connection error. The dongle is a WiFi transmitter that sends car information to your iPhone and ezOBD is able to display that information.  See video .   The video was made about a month before our first prototype rolled out so there has been some changes since then.

There are tools that make iPhone development faster and easier for the engineers but we don’t use them.
These include PhoneGap , Xamarin, Cordova, Ionic. They do shorten the development time of an iPhone app but the problem is the code is bloated. When we develop programs, we use pure native code (objective-C).  This also explains why our file size is much smaller than our competitors even though we have many of the features they have.

As a company, ezOBD is currently operating in stealth mode which means we are not actively promoting it.
The product is fully functional but falls short in the areas of usability, features, and reliability.
We will not promote it until it achieves a certain level of quality.
Please send us feedback about what you don’t like about ezOBD.

If there is a check engine light, ezOBD can turn it off but if the cause of that light was not fixed, the light will come back on with some driving.

We may possibly put in features that can change settings such as increasing performance and economy. All of that depends on what we hear from our community.

We value opinions from our customers. By having easy access to our competitors, customers will let us know what valuable features are missing from ezOBD.
We list competitors that are most likely a threat to our success. If we put any feature we see, ezOBD  will become too complex to use. To maintain simplicity, only popular features will be added. Usability is another competitive advantage we want to have.  By promoting strong competitors, our customers will send complaints to us that we need to address.

Bluetooth is better because you can access the internet while talking to your car.
With Wifi you are cut off from the internet until you unplug the dongle.
Apple devices only support Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), most of the Bluetooth dongles use older Bluetooth technologies.
Android on the other hand supports the older Bluetooth and can work these Bluetooth dongles.
There are a few BLE Bluetooth dongles but we have not developed for them yet.
Our goal for now is to support the cheap WiFi devices.
If there is a particular BLE device that you want us to support, then let us know.
If we find a BLE device on the market which is reliable and reasonably priced, we will add support for it.

We initially shipped ezOBD as a minimum viable product which means the product does what it claims but there are issues.
These issues include usability, lack of features, and reliability.
We highly value any feedback and those who submit feedback may get personal correspondence from our chief developer.
For comments go to home page and click on “we’re listening”.
Unless we get feedback, we are shooting in the dark as for what features are lacking, usability issues, and bugs.
Our highest priority is to build a strong community for customers to contribute to making ezOBD the best product possible.
Once the community decides on diretion of the product, we will put more time in reliability and usablility.