> Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible.
You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't function properly until "registered /converted/(or even) programmed" [0] at the official bmw service. The difference is that the software to do that is pirated and thus available to the 3rd parties
3rd party repairers have the ability to do this for you because they have BMW-compatible programmers. Because BMW must release make that possible for them. By law.
It's also there for a reason: the charging system needs to be told that the battery was changed and what type of battery it was changed to. Otherwise it charges it the wrong way. Unlike Apple batteries, the car batteries are dumb and can't tell the car about themselves.
The warning light won't come on just because you replaced a battery. It'll come on a few days later if you replaced a battery and didn't tell the system about it so now the battery is performing poorly because it was being charged incorrectly.
3rd party manufacturers, by law, have access to the programming tools required to do this for you. Apple holds the equivalent of these programming tools away from everyone and aggressively sues anyone that manages to obtain them or reverse engineer them.
I guess a better analogy would have been '3rd party repair shops installs genuine BMW battery but is unable to register it because the tools to do so are held hostage'.
There are 3rd party tools to register the battey not only pirated software, most automotive software now uses the same interface (j-2534 passthrough) so you pay to download the needed files for programming which is totally acceptable. Apple instead have a battery ransomware.
You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't function properly until "registered /converted/(or even) programmed" [0] at the official bmw service. The difference is that the software to do that is pirated and thus available to the 3rd parties
[o] https://bimmerscan.com/bmw-battery-registration/