I’ve been on Locals for over a year now, and while it was already great starting out, the upgrades and real improvements have been regular and measurable. I have been only pleased for making the decision to get in early and to be enjoying such a thriving community now on what has to be the best platform for an online community that exists. I will say that early on there was a small learning curve. It took a few weeks for me to fully understand the structure and design. Folks, this is true with anything. I went through the same period of having to figure out, and get familiar with, Facebook twelve years ago or however long ago it was, and so did you. If you are still hosting your work on Facebook groups, you’re on a sinking dinosaur ship. Now’s the time to get on the Locals platform, which is a million times superior in every way, because if you don’t, in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to realize you’ve been left way behind and you’ll never correct that mistake.

I joined when it was version 2.0.XX and it was literally one of the best apps I’ve ever used. When I opened it up to find I was now on 2.1.0 and started using it, it is awful. That’s not just because it was different, it simply does not work nearly as well AND it is not nearly as intuitive. For example, you can no longer touch a person‘s name when they leave a comment and then see their profile. You have to go to the ENTIRE Locals population and search for a person. THAT is really fun (NOT). Searching for Johnny123, it does not find Johnny123, it finds EVERY Johnny (without the suffix) and there’s 469 Johnnys to scroll through to find the one I’m looking for. Stupid. In addition, it defaulted to only showing the host’s posts, not everyone’s posts. I’m no dolt, even so it took me a while to figure out how to see everyone’s posts. And I am not a lone voice in the wilderness, other people in the community I’m a part of really dislike 2.1.X also.I’m really sick and tired of computer, software and app people thinking they have to change for change’s sake to make things “better“ because people get bored with the same. It’s a 50-50 shot, sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. In this case, it’s worse. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Not everyone has the attention span of a gnat so they need something different, many of us cherish what works well and don’t want it wrecked.

I almost gave it three stars but maybe this will get attention from the dev team. There are a lot of problems with the app. Namely the fast forward and rewind buttons don’t show up in full screen or embedded views. Only if you make it the small overlay view will they show up. It’s been like that forever and I dunno why. Rumble doesn’t have the problem but locals does!!! Annoying. I’ve gotten like 4 updates over the last month or two and they’ve been fixing various other bugs. I just updated again and haven’t tried it yet so I’ll leave this review short here. But overall rumble in a browser works better than the special locals app that you need to watch exclusive content. So I dunno. Oh and the chats and listings are buggy, show things out of order and limited ways to filter it. The community chats are filled with all kinds of junk and you can’t stop it. Also why isn’t there a way to just view stuff from the official accounts of the content maker? No way to @ tag or call them unless you already know their name which isn’t listed anywhere. Overall just annoying. I’d cancel my sub if it didn’t support the teams work because of the app. Developers: please look at some of the other streaming content producer apps and find a way to improve locals. It’s a great idea but poor implementation. If the fault lies with the content producer, provide them some education or help.

June 12, 2024 Updated Review: even after the Apple OS update that came shortly after the latest Locals update, I’m still not having a good user experience with the app. I have to watch from my browser. I wish I had never updated the app.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~When I first downloaded this app it worked perfectly. Also while I didn’t really like the layout of the app, I eventually got used to it. The new layout is even more frustrating like others have mentioned. For the last two updates I’ve not been able to watch the content that I pay for monthly and that’s made a majority of a months service that’s just wasted. So many people are giving the creators grief but it’s not their fault. I really hoped this new update was going to fix the problem. Nope. Got 10 minutes into Predator Poachers video and it’s crashed. Same thing that’s been wrong. I have two other subscriptions on locals and the bugs made it look like I didn’t even pay for them and I don’t have subscriber only content access. Please fix or just roll it back to the format it was before the update that killed the app. It would be nice too for the folks who pay for subscriptions, to have an adjustment that doesn’t come out of the content creators pocket.