The OBD2 Scanner for DIY Car Fault Codes UK Drivers Either Love or Bin, and How to Tell Which You'll Be
We earn commission from qualifying Amazon purchases. It costs you nothing and does not affect what we recommend.
Plug it in, clear a check engine light before an MOT, and skip the garage fee. That is the promise. For roughly a third of recent buyers the adapter never got that far, and whether you are in that group is mostly decided before you buy.
- Why the Same Adapter Gets Five Stars and One Star
- Android Sails Through, iPhone Hits a Wall the Box Warned About
- Your Car and Its Protocol Decide More Than the Advert
- The Connection Lottery, and the Clone Chip Behind It
- The 'No Payment Needed' App That Asks for Payment
- Our Call, and the Reader Who Should Buy a BLE Reader Instead
The listing title sells this RICOKEY adapter as a code reader for iOS, iPhone, Android and Windows. The warning printed on its own packaging, shown in the product photos, says the opposite: NOT Support for iOS (iPhone or iPad). That gap between what the advert promises and what the box quietly admits is the whole story of this scanner, and it is why the 100 most recent UK reviews split so hard.
Of those 100, 54 are five stars and 29 are one star, with barely anything in between. The recent average works out at 3.51, a fair drop from the 4.0 badge the listing carries across 6,201 ratings. When more than half of recent buyers are delighted and nearly a third are furious over the same cheap dongle, you are not really looking at one product. You are looking at a coin toss, and which way it lands depends on your car and your phone far more than on luck.
So the plain version first: on the recent evidence, this is not the OBD2 reader we would buy today. Not because it never works, but because whether it works for you is largely knowable before you spend a penny, and for a lot of buyers the answer is no. Below is how to tell which side you are on, and what to get instead if you are on the wrong one.
Why the Same Adapter Gets Five Stars and One Star
Strip away the star rating and this is an ELM327-style dongle: a small plug that sits in your car's OBDII port under the dashboard, talks to a phone app over Bluetooth, and reads the engine's diagnostic trouble codes. When it connects, it does the job people buy it for. It reads and clears the check engine light, shows freeze-frame data from the moment a fault triggered, and streams live sensor readings like RPM, coolant temperature, calculated load and fuel trim to your phone. The listing claims more than 3,000 generic code definitions in its database.
The five-star reviews are specific about what that saves. One buyer needed a check engine light cleared before an MOT and had the fault "read and cleared in about 3 minutes flat," skipping a garage diagnostic charge. Another used it with the Car Scanner app to pull graphs of his Land Rover's air suspension height on every wheel, calling it "an incredible amount of data" for the outlay. Clearing a code to see whether a fault is a one-off or something to investigate is the core job, and plenty of buyers get exactly that.
What it will not do is read anything outside engine and emissions systems. The packaging spells this out: it does not touch airbag, ABS, SRS, oil service or TPMS warning lights. One of the most helpful reviews, with 3 votes, repeats that warning for anyone skimming past the description. Treat it as an engine and emissions reader rather than a garage-grade all-systems scanner, and the wins above are real. The catch is getting to them.
Android Sails Through, iPhone Hits a Wall the Box Warned About
If one thing predicts which review you end up writing, it is the phone in your pocket. Android buyers report the smoothest run by a distance. The adapter pairs through the phone's Bluetooth menu, and free apps like Torque and Car Scanner connect and read codes without much fuss. The setup card even hands you the pairing password, 1234, and steers Android users towards Torque or DashCommand.
iPhone is where it falls apart. This is a classic Bluetooth adapter, the kind you pair in your phone's Bluetooth settings, and Apple's hardware does not get along with that style of dongle. The clue is on the box, in one of the listing photos: NOT Support for iOS (iPhone or iPad), printed under a warning triangle, while the title still advertises iOS. Seven of the 100 most recent reviews describe iPhone or iOS trouble. One buyer captured the divide neatly, saying it "worked well with my older Android phone in 2021," but on an iPhone 14 it "will no longer connect via Bluetooth" and "my iPhone tells me it's not compatible." Another, sold on the iOS promise, found it "asks for a pin to connect to my ios phone."
To be fair to it, two reviewers did get iOS working, one of them on iOS 26, so it is not a guaranteed dead end. But buying a Bluetooth OBD reader for an iPhone when the packaging says it is not for iPhones is a gamble with the odds printed on the box. iPhone owners really want a different type of adapter, and there is a straightforward one, named at the end.
RICOKEY OBD2 Bluetooth Scanner
On Android with a mainstream car from the mid-2000s to mid-2010s? This reads and clears engine fault codes cheaply. Confirm it covers your exact make and model year before buying.
Your Car and Its Protocol Decide More Than the Advert
The advert promises universal reach: every OBDII-compliant vehicle from 1996 in the US, 2003 in the EU, and all nine OBDII protocols. In practice, your car is the second big fork in the road. Eight of the 100 most recent reviewers report it simply would not work with their vehicle, and the pattern in who wins and who loses is worth reading before you order.
The happy reviews skew towards mainstream, older cars. Owners name a 2013 Mini, a 2013 Renault Captur, a 2018 Hyundai i30N and a Ford Focus among the cars it read and cleared without drama. The failures cluster into two groups. The first is specific newer or less common models: one buyer got nothing from a 2020 VW Tiguan, another drew a blank on a Peugeot 3008. The second is motorbikes. A BMW motorcycle and a Suzuki Inazuma both went unread, and bike compatibility is often patchy with cheap OBDII dongles whatever the box claims.
There is a manufacturer wrinkle the listing's own screenshots concede. One product photo, a Torque status screen, carries a note that "cheap clone versions of this adapter" may not work with the J1850-PWM protocol used by some Ford and other vehicles, and can suffer corrupted communications. That is the seller quietly admitting what the clone-chip market does to reliability. The advice is dull but it saves the aggravation: look up your car's OBDII protocol and read recent reviews from owners of your make and model year before buying, rather than trusting the blanket compatibility claim.
The Connection Lottery, and the Clone Chip Behind It
Now the single biggest complaint, and the one that drags the average down hardest. Eleven of the 100 most recent reviewers could not get the adapter to connect at all, and most of them were not on iPhones. It spans Android phones and tablets too. One said it "shows up on Bluetooth probably 1 in 30 times." Another could not pair it "despite different phones tablets etc." When a dongle will not even show up to be paired with, none of the code-reading matters.
Some of this is the clone-chip problem. Cheap ELM327-style adapters are made by many factories to wildly varying standards, so two units off the same listing can behave differently, and a straight dud is always possible at this price. If it never appears on any device, that is a unit to return rather than fight.
But not every "faulty" report is a faulty unit, and this is where buyers can rescue their own purchase. The most useful tip in the reviews comes from a buyer who nearly sent his back: "remember to have your engine running when using the app," because "I thought it was faulty at first" when the app would not connect, until it worked with the engine on. Several apps also need you to set the connection type to Bluetooth and pick the OBDII device inside the app, not just in the phone's settings. The realistic routine is engine on, a recommended app installed, and a little patience with the pairing. Do that and a chunk of the one-star connection failures never happen. Skip it and you become one of them.
The 'No Payment Needed' App That Asks for Payment
The adapter is only half of what you are buying. It is a dumb radio; the app on your phone does the diagnosing, and that is where a second round of frustration lives. Four of the 100 recent reviewers complain that the app pushed them towards a paid subscription after they had bought the hardware believing nothing more was needed. One wanted the fault detail but found "you can only get to find out exactly whats wrong with the car with paying a subscription, even though it says no payment needed." Another put it bluntly: it "sucks that most apps require you to pay again."
This is not a rogue claim, it is baked into the listing. One product photo shows an app throwing up an "Application license restriction" box with a "Buy" button over a locked function, and the app section is openly headed "Various Free and Paid Apps." Some of the more capable manufacturer-specific and premium apps really do charge, and the free tiers can lock the very feature you wanted behind that wall.
The way round it is app choice. On Android, Torque and Car Scanner are the names buyers keep returning to, and reviewers report getting real work done on free or one-off apps rather than subscriptions. One buyer's takeaway was that the hard part is "finding the best app on Google Play store that's compatible with your car." Go in expecting to try two or three apps before you settle, and knowing the very cheap dongle can still land you an app that wants money, and the paywall stops being a nasty surprise.
Our Call, and the Reader Who Should Buy a BLE Reader Instead
So the call, with the working shown. The 100 most recent reviews average 3.51, down from the 4.0 badge the listing wears across 6,201 ratings, and 34 of those 100 sit at one or two stars. The single largest fault, an adapter that will not connect at all, hit 11 of 100. We land on 3.0 out of 5: not a broken product, but a coin toss dressed up as a universal one, and not something we would spend our own money on as a first choice.
It is not worthless. If you run an Android phone and a mainstream car built roughly between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, and you are happy to try a couple of apps with the engine running, this is a lot of capability for very little, and the five-star reviews are real people clearing real codes before an MOT. If that is you, check the current listing on Amazon and confirm it covers your exact model.
For everyone else, and iPhone owners especially, spend a little more and buy the right tool. A BLE adapter such as the Veepeak OBDCheck BLE+ or the vgate iCar Pro pairs inside the app rather than through your phone's Bluetooth menu, and is built and sold to work with iOS, which is exactly the wall this one hits. It costs more than a bargain-bin dongle, but it removes the two failures behind most of the one-star reviews here: the iPhone incompatibility the box admits to, and the pairing lottery. We have not reviewed a BLE reader on the site yet, so treat those as the names to search rather than a link, and pick the one whose recent reviews match your car.
RICOKEY OBD2 Bluetooth Scanner
On Android with a mainstream car from the mid-2000s to mid-2010s? This reads and clears engine fault codes cheaply. Confirm it covers your exact make and model year before buying.