Spectacularly awful Mini phone app onboarding experience; need help or advice (and, honestly, need to rant)

Apologies for how long this is.

Hi! I just bought a 2025 Mini Countryman. It came with only one keyfob, which I think is normal now but makes me nervous because I'm a space cadet and tend to mislay things.

So I needed to set up the Mini app on my phone (a Pixel 8 Pro) and pair it with the car, so I'd have an alternative way to get in if I locked my fob in the car or dropped it in the road and it got run over (which happened to another set of keys recently). (Aside: I hate having to install an app on my phone in order to set up my car!)

Step 1 was creating a new Mini ID on the web and that worked OK. And I added the Mini by VIN to "My Garage" on the website; it still shows up there. I then installed the Mini app on my phone and logged in.

The next morning I needed to get to a medical appointment, but I foolishly thought this would be quick and simple, so I started the process of pairing the Mini app with my car.

(As an aside, when I drove the car home from the dealer, it had a "Guest" profile, which was the "primary profile", and a "Driver" profile. I had been using the "Driver" profile, and I think the Android Auto connection was specific to that profile. This will be relevant later.)

So I followed the instructions in the app, which started with transcribing the 17-character VIN. I got to the point where it says to tap the profile icon on the dashboard and log in using the QR code. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but figured out that in the "Driver" profile I could tap "Log in with Mini ID" and bring up a QR code. I did that and scanned the code, and after a few moments, the car knew my name! "Driver" became "Jay"! It told me to continue in the app.

But the app had no way to continue, because while the car had connected to my Mini ID, the app had not connected to the car. So I tried to repeat the process NEEDING TO TRANSCRIBE THE VIN EVERY TIME, but when I got to the point where the app told me to scan the QR code, there was no QR code, since the car thought I was already logged in!

I tried that a couple times, and then figured that if the car thought it was connected to my Mini ID and refused to show the QR code again, but the phone app didn't think it was connected to the car, I could delete the Mini ID from the profile and then start from scratch and scan the QR code again. I couldn't find a "log out" option, but I did find a "Manage Mini IDs" option, and in that it showed me the "Jay" profile with a delete icon which I assumed deleted the connection to the Mini ID. So I tapped it. And it deleted the entire profile, not just the Mini ID connection. Including all my Android Auto connection info and other settings.

At this point, I had a "Guest" profile and no other profile. So I tried to create a new profile I could try (again) to associate with my Mini ID. I tapped the button to create a new profile and started getting prompted to set it up but quickly got "Unable to log you in. Try again later". And my only choice was to back out but I got warned that my profile would be discarded if I did that. I went ahead and did that and gave up, since I had an appointment.

At this point, Android Auto was still working, at least. I stopped at a gas station to fill up (for the first time since buying the car), and when I got back in the car Android Auto would not connect. (I forget all the troubleshooting I did at the time but it wasn't much because I was in a hurry.)

So I started driving to my appointment (which ended up being an hour and a half drive because of unusually bad traffic) with no Android Auto, but I could use the radio and I could use the map built into the car. Well, sort of. Given that traffic was so bad there must have been an accident somewhere, I tapped the microphone icon in hopes that that would let me use the built-in navigation system to get where I was going if I experimented with avoiding my usual route.

And when I tapped the microphone icon, I got a "Please log into your Mini ID" popup. While I was driving. (And with no suggestions for how to do so.) So at least I had a map I could follow along with but I didn't have my music or podcasts and I didn't have any navigation help.

After work, and after having done a little bit of research, I tried the process again in the parking garage, and it failed in the same way. ("Unable to log you in; try again later".) I did notice that a "Driver 2" profile had somehow gotten created, and it brought up a blank black square where the QR code ought to be. (Took me a while to figure out what that was!)

After giving up on that, since each attempt to add my Mini ID to the new "Driver 2" profile said "Try again later" and made me re-enter my VIN, I tried to add my Mini ID to the "Guest" profile. And that failed saying "Your credentials are incorrect", although I was using the same phone app logged into the same Mini ID. But I was able to re-pair Android Auto to the guest profile at least (or so I thought), so I had navigation on the way home.

However, I had a couple errands to run on my way home. And I discovered I had to re-pair Android Auto from scratch each time! I guess that makes sense for a real guest profile, but I no longer have any other profiles, and my attempts to add new profiles constantly fail with "try again later".

I am an IT professional, but I don't want to own a car that only an IT professional can drive.

I kinda think my crucial error was deleting the original "Driver" profile I got from the dealership by accident. And I also wonder if part of this problem might have been how the profiles were set up when I got the car. But in any case — does anybody have any idea what's going on here, and how I can create or recreate a usable profile that I can associate with my Mini ID, and how I can get my phone app properly paired with the car?

(I don't see any option for contacting Mini support other than a phone call. And right now I'm too upset and tired for a phone call. And I kind of needed to vent.)

Don't get me wrong; I love this car! But I think treating everything — cars, refrigerators, blood-pressure monitors, what-have-you — as an application running in the cloud first and a device owned by specific humans second if at all is a major mistake. (Well, for humanity, anyway. Maybe not a mistake for the companies' bottom lines, although my experience today was not a selling point.)