GettingOut 17+

I would give 0 stars, but if I didn’t have this, I would have nothing. The only portion of this I have any success with is the messaging. Calls are a nightmare. If they are in a facility with Covid lockdown, there is no video and they need earbuds to hear at all. I guess there is no funding so they share the headphones. He never seems to get them, even if I ask ahead of the call. Making the calls are super sketchy and take forever to load, if they load at all. I constantly have to refresh to get the call to re-up. I have been charged for multiple calls where he and I tried to connect and he could not hear me. If the time is ticking you get charged no matter the ability or lack of talking to them. Putting funds on the system is a whole other thing. The app crashes constantly and putting money on accounts takes just as much work as everything else. My first day with this, I spent a total of twelve hours between struggling with the app, calling the getting out help center twice, calling the jail multiple times, and trying to get connected on a call. I thought I would have a stroke by the time the day was over. I know it is not just me, because my daughter has yet to get her account activated with money accepted, and she is pretty tech savvy. It has left me even more depressed than I was to begin with, to think this is all I have. Get it together! This should be a class action law suit for the amount of money you get and don’t refund for NOTHING!

The process went pretty smoothly for me. Bugs must have been fixed since that May review. At least for messaging. There was one hiccup during set up when an error occurred and it said they would send me an email to confirm my email. It took awhile to get the email. It said there were duplicate accounts. I think because my brother without realizing it had created an account for me. Anyway got cleared up in about 30 minutes. I love that there is an app. I started out on the website. I love being able to message my brother as if I was texting him. For us and maybe others it was not instant of course messages have to be approved. At one point I stepped away for about 30 minutes and when I came back my messages were approved. My brother was able to let me know an issue he was having with iheart radio and I got to fix it that night! Normally he’d be trying to reach me by phone for days! At least for me I cannot send pictures electronically. I guess you could in the past or maybe other prisons can. I went to the app and the app said they would print my pictures and mail them and it was about $8 for two pictures. For messaging also there is a limit on length but it’s pretty long. But my first time I went one character over and it was deleted. But again overall I am very happy with this!!

I love this app. It does have its problems like it crashes a lot and it’s slow sometimes and it refreshes back to the beginning when I try to login and add money to an account. But with all that being said I am very grateful that an app like this exists. Yes like I said it has a lot of problems but this and the video app are a great way for me to keep up with my friend in jail in another state. I do have some suggestions though. I would love it if you guys would add a feature that would notify us when we have a new message from the person or people we message. Because it could be an urgent message that has a time limit and we miss it because we have to constantly keep checking back on the app to see if we have a new message. Also a feature if you could that shows when they have read our messages that way we know that they are getting them. Not everyone gets messages from the other side. We don’t always get messages from the person on the inside and it would just be nice to know they read the messages. Kind of like you have them pending and approved maybe you can make it to where the inmate can mark the message as read when they read it. The messages are cheap and affordable and other then those few things like I said I love the system. Thank you for creating this app.