I looked into the software part some time ago, sadly you very quickly run into the WICED wall where the sources are just not available anymore.
The calls to the WICED code all return ok, so for the photon pov everything is ok, yet the dhcp server is not giving out ips.
If you manually set your ip to 192.168.0.5 for example after connecting to the wifi, you can complete the softAP setup using a webapp.
But only particle developers can see any deeper than the wiced calls to debug the issue, it does indeed seem like a issue that could be solved in software.