Oh come on, you guys are too harsh!
We're not sure how saying: "hey guys we're working on it; still working on it; work in progress; still not done but hey we're working on it" can make a difference, until, a solution is in place and is available. We could do a weekly post here to say work is in progress but I don't think that's what everyone's really after.
OBD unlock task is high priority. It is being worked on. Progress is there but slow. Resources for this development work aren't the same resources building app/web and other features being worked on. This is why you see updates happen on other features in the system more frequently. Are the web/app developers better or more efficient? We're sure they'd like to think so but we all know that's not the case given complexity of tasks involved.
OBD unlock type work falls in the area of reverse engineering. It is orders of magnitude more time consuming for many technical reasons. I'd imagine most of you on this board aren't software developers. Those that may be, probably aren't into low level disassembly, let alone intimately familiar with Tricore architecture, disassembler/debugger tools, etc. If you are, send us your resume and lets get crackin'
In a nutshell, and to put this as simple as possible, working on OBD unlock isn't a typical software development task where you're working with source code to build some new functionality. In this case you're working on compiled, executable, machine code and working backwards to make sense out of something only computer/chip is really meant to execute. Machine code is very different from source code in the sense that its much harder to read/interpret especially when the task at hand is to get around something that's put in place to make it hard, harder than before, to do so.
Hope that sheds some light on work involved. In the meantime, as others mentioned, bench unlocking works great. It takes less than hour to pull the DME by any skilled shop. We do the unlock free of charge if DME is mailed to us. Turn around is same day and we use DHL Express. Its 1 day in North America, 2 days anywhere else in the World. Many shops have the bench unlock tools such as KTAG, Autotuner among others, in house to do so. Bench unlock for your S55 is done by applying the patch to your 'current' software version. It doesn't revert back to an older version where you may get a software update again, unless a brand new software update is released. If/when that happens its back to square one on all the OBD unlock work done so far and the cycle repeats.