Soul EV Spy

Review by eFreeware

Electric car owners often have less insight into their battery than they would like. The dashboard shows a percentage and an estimated range, and that is about it. Questions about how much capacity the pack has actually lost, how warm individual modules run, or what a warning light really means tend to go unanswered unless you have a way to talk to the car's own systems.

Soul EV Spy is built for exactly that gap. It is a paid Android app from EVRanger.com, priced at $16.99, aimed at owners of Kia and Hyundai electric cars who want to read detailed data from the vehicle through an OBD-II adapter plugged into the standard port. It has been on Google Play since September 2019 and was last updated in November 2025, with more than 1,000 installs and a 4.1 average from 70 ratings.

The battery picture the app is built around

The feature the developer leads with is battery state of health, and it is the reason most owners would consider the app at all. Soul EV Spy reads the main battery's condition and shows it directly, rather than leaving you to infer it from range estimates that shift with weather and driving style. For anyone planning to keep a car for years, or buying a used EV and wanting to know what shape the pack is in, that number is the whole point.

Alongside state of health, the app displays battery management system cell voltages and module temperatures. Those two readings matter because a pack rarely degrades evenly. Being able to see whether one module is running hotter than its neighbors, or whether a group of cells is drifting away from the rest, turns a vague worry into something concrete you can track over time.

The developer notes that state of health, cell voltages and module temperatures are shown for all supported Kia and Hyundai electric vehicles, including possibly plug-in and conventional hybrids. Beyond that core set, exactly which values you get depends on the make, model and year of the car. That is worth keeping in mind: the app is not promising an identical dashboard for every vehicle it runs on.

Energy use, temperatures and error codes

The app goes past the battery itself. It extracts energy consumption figures, monitors temperatures, and reads error codes from the car's systems. For an owner chasing an intermittent warning light, being able to pull the codes before a workshop visit is useful, and energy use data appeals to anyone who wants to understand how their driving translates into consumption rather than guessing from the trip meter.

There is also a location side to the app. It uses location access to find nearby DC fast chargers, to calculate the car's speed, and to record where the car was for each reading written into the data file. Those three uses are distinct, and they explain why the permission request appears at all in an app that is otherwise about battery readings.

On some Android versions the app asks for file system access, and if that is granted it can save data files into the Download folder. Those files can be replayed inside the app later, or taken out and opened in a spreadsheet for graphs and deeper analysis. That is the part that turns a live readout into a record you can compare month to month.

The interface is available in English by default, or in the phone's preferred system language when that is one of the translated options, which include Swedish, Spanish, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian and Russian.

The adapter question comes first

The most important thing to understand before buying is that the app does not work on its own. It needs a Vgate iCar Pro BT4.0 OBD-II adapter plugged into the car's standard OBD-II port. The developer singles out that dongle as the recommended one, and describes it as the only adapter of those tested recently that supports the commands needed to communicate with the car's systems.

The compatibility warnings are unusually blunt. The app supports classic Bluetooth only, not BLE, which rules out a long list of ELM327 Bluetooth adapters regardless of what they cost. Konnwei has changed the KW902 many times, and the developer warns that several versions will not work. Most adapters, the note continues, either lack enough buffer space or do not support the commands the app relies on.

So the realistic cost of using Soul EV Spy is the app price plus a suitable adapter, and the realistic risk is buying the wrong dongle first. If you already own a Vgate iCar Pro BT4.0, you are in the clear. If you have a drawer full of generic adapters, the odds are not in your favor, and it is worth sorting that out before paying for the app.

What the app will and will not do to your car

The developer is explicit that the app only reads. It cannot change any settings in the car, and it does not write anything back. Everything it does is pull data through the dongle, display it, and save it to files. For anyone nervous about an aftermarket tool touching a vehicle's control systems, that read-only design is the reassuring part.

Kia, Hyundai and the makers of the car's internal systems have no involvement with the app, and the developer states plainly that because it talks to those systems, the car could behave differently from normal. Anyone who chooses to use it is responsible for the consequences. That is a serious disclaimer, and it is worth reading as written rather than skimming past.

The supported list is broad for a tool of this type. It covers the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6, Kia EV6 and EV9, Kia e-Niro, Kia e-Soul from 2020 onward, Hyundai Kona EV, Hyundai Ioniq EV, Kia Soul EV from 2014 to 2019, Hyundai Porter II EV, Kia Bongo III EV, Hyundai BlueOn EV and Kia Ray EV. The developer also lists the Genesis EV, Kia Optima PHEV and other Kia or Hyundai plug-in and conventional hybrids as possibly yielding some data, and invites owners to report what they find by email.

Getting useful numbers out of it

The sensible way to approach an app like this is to decide what question you want answered before you plug anything in. If it is battery health, one reading gives you a starting point and periodic readings give you a trend. If it is a fault, pull the codes and keep the file. If it is energy use, the saved readings are what let you compare one month against another rather than relying on memory.

That is where the file export earns its keep. Readings saved into the Download folder can be opened in a spreadsheet, so you can chart state of health over a year, look for a module that consistently runs warmer, or simply keep a record that travels with the car if you sell it. Buyers of used EVs tend to appreciate that kind of documentation, and it costs nothing extra to accumulate once the app is running.

Read the user guide and FAQ before a first attempt. Recent updates fixed permissions, background location access, hangs, crashes and missing values, and added support for the Ioniq 5, EV6, Porter II EV and Bongo III EV and a 58 kWh battery management system. An app that talks to a car over a dongle has a lot of moving parts, and the update history shows those parts being tended to.

A focused tool for owners who want the numbers

Soul EV Spy is not a general-purpose car app. It is a diagnostic reader for a specific family of vehicles, and it asks you to buy a particular adapter and accept that you are using an unapproved tool on your own car. Within those boundaries it does something genuinely useful: it turns the battery from a black box into a set of readings you can watch, save and analyze.

At $16.99 with no ads and no in-app purchases, the app itself is a straightforward one-time purchase, and the adapter is the larger outlay. Owners of a supported Kia or Hyundai who already have the Vgate iCar Pro BT4.0 will get the most direct value. Those who are still choosing a dongle should treat the compatibility notes as the deciding factor, because the app is only as good as the adapter feeding it.

If you want to know how your battery is really aging, or you want error codes and energy data in a form you can keep, this is a well-targeted tool with a long update history behind it. If you are looking for something that works with whatever adapter is already in your glove box, the requirements here are narrow enough that you should check them carefully before spending anything.

What's new in version 1.0.12-2250

Migrate to SDK 36. Previous: Fix model selection issue. Integrity check. Fix background location access. Fix permissions. Fix hang, crash and missing values. Hyundai Ioniq 5 & Kia EV6: (BMS, VIN, TPMS, heatpump). Hyundai Porter II EV and Kia Bongo III EV. Parse VIN for new models. 58 kWh BMS. Ukranian, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, Catalan, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Finnish, Norwegian, English. Aircon.