After all of this, you're never really sure if the car actually locks. Needless to say, this isn't very user friendly at all. The rest of the functionality is basically the same.

To send a location to the car, you need to go to Google Local Search (See step 4) and search for where you want to go. Then you need to access a sub-menu and then tap send-to-vehicle.

I may be wrong, but I thought the point of this app was to make the user's life less-complicated. How is this any easier than pulling out my key and walking back to my car to lock it? It's not.

Mobile apps are all about removing friction from the user's life and bring small moments of joy throughout the user's day. I would make the case, that if your app doesn't do either, don't bother building it.

Seeing as I will have my car for the next 3 years, I decided to make my own BMW Remote App. One evening I sat down at my computer and took a look at what the existing BMW Remote App does. Under the hood, it's basically a simple networking app that hits a RESTful API over at BMW. Using common developer tools I documented their entire workflow. All in, it was about 2 hours. Now I was ready to build my own.

My main goal was to create a version of the app that I would love to use. I brought the core (important) functionality to the front of the app.

Step 1: Launch the App (icon pending)