There is a channel “Last Car Activity”. As long as the current time is no later than 15 Minutes after the time in that channel, the binding does updates basically as fast as it can.
The car is marked as active, if either the engine runs, the car is charging or remote climate is activated. This are basically the states of the car when the H/V battery is on.
This works as long as the car is active, but as soon as it not active anymore I don’t do any polling anymore. You can enable start notifications in the iSmart App, that send a message over the API every time the engine is started. I’m polling those and set the car to active to start car polling again.
The “Force Refresh” button sets the active date to now - 14 Minutes, so that the fast polling is enabled for a minute. This can be used to wake up polling, if for example a charger enables charging in the middle of the night, or you want to see the interior temperature in the morning to see if you need to defrost.
There seems to be no API limit on how fast or how often you can query the car data, but if the H/V battery is off, you can drain your 12V battery pretty fast.
I suppose it is possible to query the car once every X minutes in “inactive” mode, to get the car status for a parked car. But after getting my first 12V battery warning in the morning, I haven’t tried that again. 
Regarding location and light flashing: I plan to support all features, the app supports, or if possible even more. The European App seems to be a copy paste of the Thai-App, with some features disabled, but the code is still there. Maybe some functions are only disabled in the App, but actually working in the API. We will see.