Portal - Escape Into Nature 4+

This app is by far my favorite app on the App Store, hands down. Top quality audoscapes that are well worth getting you hands on!
I recently experienced a glitch with one of the newest updates. I reached out to the team and explained my situation and got a response from them within 10 minutes! After a few back and forth a they pushed out 3 updates in an attempt to help me with my issue! 3! These guys are amazing. The guy I was talking to was very polite and apologetic and worked his hardest to help me resolve my issue. Stu, you are a legend mate, thank you!

Dave.

Hi Saagusaurus Dave!

Thanks so much for taking the time to pen such an incredibly kind review! We do our best to ensure every release is perfect and bug-free, quite simply because we know how many people rely on Portal throughout their days. But unfortunately this one blind-sided us. An isolated but super tricky bug that gave us not a crumb of a clue as to what was causing it. In truth, it if weren't for your patience, kindness and understanding we might still be losing sleep on how to fix it. So, honestly, a HUGE thanks to you - we're very lucky to have had you in our corner!

Thanks so much! 🙏

Andy, Nick, Tim & Stu - the Portal Team.

As someone who (like many other people) need noise to be able to work; this app has been fantastic for relaxation, working or just contemplation. The videos are of extremely high quality and the audio works well on all devices I have tried. 9/10.
Some possible suggestions for the future:
- Download videos. I'm not sure if videos are always the same quality, but being able to choose a high bitrate version on purpose would be wonderful. Especially when out in the field and being offline.
- Possibly longer video loops, a few of them are a bit short.
- Videos that might be classified as ordinary, as much as I love the exclusive locations. Just a random quiet beach or nature reserve would possibly feel more relatable and make the viewer more relaxed.

Otherwise a great application, thank-you Portal team for all your effort, it's greatly appreciated!

👋 Hi Gaso33,

Thanks so much for your feedback - the time and effort to do so is most definitely not lost on us!

We're always keen on closing those gaps and taking the Portal experience onto the next level and closer to perfection, so we're super appreciative of suggestions like yours. I've just popped down some thoughts below that hopefully provide a glimpse into where we're at and what we're thinking - hopefully, you'll find it helpful.

(1) Downloads
This is most definitely on the cards for sure. We're currently experimenting with this at the moment that allows you to locally download your 'favourites' so that they're available offline. Currently, when you are playing a particular portal, the Portal app will check what screen resolution you have available at the time and request from our servers the highest resolution video to suit your display(s) - so you should always get the highest quality visuals possible for your set up. The only caveat with this is some of our older portals were filmed with a lower resolution camera, so the resolution quality for certain older portals has a ceiling. That being said, the majority of our Library has been shot using a 12K cinematic digital camera - so it should only be a small number with this upper limit.

We'll likely follow this same approach for downloads - albeit, we are considering including the option to download lower quality visuals if that a preference from a storage persective - some of our high resolution portals are quite hefty - but that's still up in the air at the minute, as most feedback we've received so far is people would simply prefer the highest quality stuff.

(2) Loops
I'm afraid, this is a bit of a legacy of some of our older portals - when Portal was only available on iPhone - and so download sizes was a much bigger concern, as such our older portals, especially those in our 'Portal Classics' collection will have shorter loops - although most are in excess of 5 mins. The good news is a lot of our newer portals - that have been shot in 12K - have much much longer loops.

(3) Ordinary Locations
You are bang on our wavelength here. A lot of the latest research points to the fact that familiarity is a key ingredient to the effectiveness of digital experiences of nature - and the benefits that can bring to people when they can't get outdoors and experience the real things. As such, we will most definitely be placing more of a focus on those less exotic but more familiar 'ordinary' locations that evoke 'lived experience' memories for our customer-base. So please watch this space.

I hope the above helps. If you have any questions or any further suggestions, please do drop us a line at hello@portal.app - we'd love to hear them.

On a final note, honestly there's no need to thank us - it's very kind, but truth be told, we get a heap of joy, satisfaction and pride in doing what we do. Hearing from people like yourself that are thoroughly enjoying Portal and that it's making a positive difference in people's lives is what it's all about for us and thanks enough!

We really appreciate your support and enthusiasm - without people like you in our corner, Portal simply wouldn't be able to continue to exist.

Stu, Alex, Andy, Nick & Tim - Team Portal.