So I updated Sync 3 to the official version 3 off the syncmyride website in the SHO to get Waze working with the Ford Alexa app. I updated my wife’s Flex a couple months ago, and it worked fine. After letting it do its thing and say the update finished, rebooting, and then letting it finish again just like the Flex, the update appeared to work. It said version 3.0 on the about screen. When I drove it yesterday I used nav for the first time since the update. There were no nav voice prompts, and the voice control button didn’t work giving me an error message saying “voice recognition not ready.” I read a bunch of posts on various Ford forums and this seems like a common issue and people had it solved by having the dealer update their APIM.
I dropped it off at the dealer and this is what I get back. ^^^^ They said since I was already at version. 3.0, they couldn’t update it since that was the current version. Surely dealers can force an update with IDS. They also said version 3 didn’t work at all, and were willing to do nothing. That’s kinda funny because thousands of people are running 3.0 with no problems. I asked if you can’t fix it, then change the APIM and write the software to it. They talked to me like I was an idiot and said that wouldn’t work because it was already at 3.0 and they couldn’t update if I had the current version and Ford wouldn’t authorize it anyway. Doesn’t the Sync software write to the APIM so changing it would revert to a blank unit ready for software? Basically, they said I was SOL and go away. I can’t believe the incompetence at dealers. I spent an hour reading on the F150 forum and found an old thread showing how to roll back to version 2.2 from the leaked 3.0 from earlier this year. I did that to my corrupted official 3.0 and now it’s working fine. I feel like taking it back to those idiots and showing them it’s working where they said there was no fix. Pretty sad when you have a car under warranty and you have to fix it yourself.
Anyway, if anybody else has this problem on a nav equipped Sync 3, roll back to 2.2 with this file. https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=wvQm&id=0ByldYbWwjAf4VXpfdnVNNlVjdzg
Then you can retry the update to 3.0. You can do it on non nav units too, but it’s much more complex and involves editing the config files. I’m not sure if you can post links to other forums here, so just search for a thread on the F150 forum detailing how called
HOWTO Downgrade Sync3 v3.0 back to Ford Official v2.2 (build 17011).