Quote Originally Posted by Arin@APR View Post
I don't think it would be a good move. It would cut out our dealer network, which is a group of APR experts around the world. The level of support they give is more valuable than home flashing in my opinion. Also, to be frank, port flashing could easily go away with an update from the factory. It could be gone on next year's ECUs too. It would also open us up to theft should the program be easily accessible and really make it easy for others to figure out how we're flashing the ECU, which was hard work. And back on the dealer support note, bricking an ECU would be troublesome. Without the dealer network to take care of that situation, you would be left on your own.
As a potential customer, I like the idea of being able to DIY flashing back to stock and vice versa. One middle ground suggestion might be to provide a DIY tool that *only* allows you to flash back to stock. For example, assume something goes wrong to your car and you need to immediately take to the dealer for warranty work. Currently, you'd need to first take it to an APR dealer (possibly on flatbed), coordinate the flash with them (which might be on a weekend, so you're SOL) and then take it to the audi dealer. I suppose this method might this still open up your IP for theft though...

My ideal situation (i.e. I would pay more for this, maybe $400 extra) would be: DIY tool to flash ECU completely back to stock, no fee to re-flash the tune from the APR dealer.

As it is now (local SE MI dealers aren't as friendly as some others I've seen), I'd need to pay an hour of labor to go stock, and then an hour of labor to go back to the tune, just for the Audicare service (this is overly paranoid since they likely wouldn't scan the ECU, but I think people juggle with this scenario). Which turns 1 trip during work hours into 3, with the first 2 needing to be reasonably synchronized.